Faze Clan announced on Thursday that they are removing Kay from Faze Clan, and suspending Jarvis, Nikan, and Teeqo for an indefinite period of time. Their removal appears to be related to an alleged cryptocurrency scam that the four players were involved in.
“FaZe Clan had absolutely no involvement with our members’ activity in the cryptocurrency space, and we strongly condemn their recent behavior,” FaZe Clan said in their statement. “The trust and respect of our fans has been, and will always be, our number one priority.”
All four members of FaZe Clan were involved in pushing a crypto token called “Save the Kids” to their fans. The creators of Save the Kids claimed that the $KIDS token would help “[build] a better world for kids” by donating 1% of the 3% trade fee for each $KIDS token trades to charity. The Save The Kids website is not currently available and is marked as “under construction” when you attempt to visit it.
The value of the $KIDS coin crashed very quickly after FaZe Clan members and other online influencers including Sommer Ray and Rice Gum encouraged their fans to invest in the token. After the full release, large holders of pre-sale tokens reportedly flooded the market with their tokens causing those who bought the coin to lose money. Many have since accused “Save the Kids” and those who promoted it of creating an influencer “pump and dump” scam, causing a PR crisis for all the brand ambassadors who pushed the coin.
A pump-and-dump scam is when a group of influential people hype up the value of a product, like this crypto-coin, and then once the value is high they dump their assets at the expense of those they convinced to invest in the coin. Such schemes often involve a crypto coin partnering with an influencer and paying them in the coin itself, so the influencer can cash in the second the coin is released to the public. It remains unclear what the exact relationship between the ambassadors and Save the Kids org was.
The Save the Kids alt-coin controversy was brought to public attention by YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers, who on Saturday made a nearly 40-minute video about the influencer ambassadors for Save the Kids. In the video, SomeOrindaryGamers showed the plethora of the red flags raised regarding the alt-coin and pointed out that most of the influencers who tweeted in support of the coin deleted their posts after things went south.
FaZe Kay apologized for his involvement as an ambassador of the cursed Save the Kids token on Sunday.
FaZe Jarvis, FaZe Teeqo, and Faze Nikan have not released a public comment about their involvement in the crypto-scheme as of writing this article.
Based on today’s actions, FaZe Clan appears to be distancing themselves from both the specific scam, and cryptocurrency more broadly. We have reached out to FaZe Clan for further clarification of their decision.
This is a breaking story, we will update it as new information becomes available.