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A Kid Made $50,000 Dumping Crypto He’d Created. Then Came the Backlash

In less than 10 minutes, a US teen made a small fortune selling off a memecoin he’d made on a lark. Traders, feeling swindled, sought revenge.

In this case, Biesk’s son had seemingly performed what is known as a soft rug pull, whereby somebody creates a new crypto token, promotes it online, then sells off their entire holdings either swiftly or over time, sinking its price. Though under California law someone must be at least 18 years old to gamble or invest in stocks, the unregulated memecoin market, which has been compared to a “ casino ” in risk profile, had given Biesk’s teenage son early access to a similar arena, in which some must lose for others to profit. Equally disturbed and bewildered, Biesk and his wife formed a provisional plan: to make all public social media accounts private, stop answering the phone, and, generally, hunker down until things blew over.

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