Meteora Founder Accused of Using Melania Trump, Milei for $57M Memecoin Scam

A class action lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York accuses Meteora co-founder Benjamin Chow of orchestrating a systematic fraud scheme that weaponized celebrity endorsements from Melania Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei to defraud retail crypto investors of at least $57 ￰0￱ Second Amended Class Action Complaint alleges Chow and associates operated the Meteora-Kelsier Enterprise as a “ fraud factory ” disguised as decentralized finance, using the Meteora liquidity-pooling protocol on Solana as the core engine for multi-token pump-and-dump operations across $M3M3 , $LIBRA , $MELANIA , $ENRON , and $TRUST. Plaintiffs Omar Hurlock, Anuj Mehta, and John Winslow claim that defendants exploited technical settings, like whitelists and freeze/thaw toggles, to acquire a majority of the token supplies at negligible cost before manufacturing artificial price spikes through undisclosed paid ￰1￱ analysis identified a central coordinating wallet, prefixed 0xcEA, that repeatedly funded deployer wallets, creating tokens, seeding initial liquidity, and financing sniper wallets that captured early supply.) August 23, 2022 The $MELANIA fraud marketed the token as the official meme coin of Melania Trump, with claimed vesting mechanisms to protect against ￰2￱ connected to the Meteora-Kelsier cluster accumulated approximately one-third of the entire supply in minutes before the official ￰3￱ orchestrated hype, insider wallets dumped tokens into the surge, with the price subsequently losing over 90% of market capitalization within ￰4￱ Ventures CEO Hayden Davis, who co-founded both $LIBRA and $MELANIA, stated in a YouTube interview that “ we sniped our own coin to prevent snipers from sniping our own coin. “ Chow Resigned in February, Now Faces RICO Charges Back in February 2025, Ben Chow stepped down from Meteora following the $LIBRA controversy , with Jupiter co-founder Meow stating that, while confident in Chow’s character, he showed “ a lack of judgment and care about some of the core aspects of the project. ” A leaked video posted by SolanaFloor showed DeFiTuna founder Dhirk informing Chow about Davis’s misconduct, with Chow expressing visible shock and stating, “ I feel so sick, because I gave him Melania.

I fucked up because I enabled the guy that should not have been enabled. “ The lawsuit alleges that Chow maintained unique expertise in controlling technology, directing the configuration of liquidity pools, fee routing, trading parameters, and the ability to freeze or thaw trading ￰5￱ Labs secretly agreed to invest approximately $2 million into Meteora’s operations as a pay-to-play buy-in.