Taylor Swift may have been the only celebrity with doubts about the legality of FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed last year, according to a lawyer leading a class-action lawsuit against the groups high-profile ambassadors.

Adam Moskowitz, a key attorney in the class-action lawsuit against the celebrity ambassadors who promoted FTX, said legal discovery proceedings revealed that Swift did due diligence on FTX. Moskowitz made the comments on The Blocks The Scoop podcast released Wednesday.

FTX failed last year amid allegations of fraud, wiping away billions of dollars of customer and investor money and shaking crypto markets. Sam Bankman-Fried, the exchanges founder and former CEO, faces a number of financial crime charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Moskowitz and representatives for Swift and Bankman-Fried didnt immediately respond to requests for comment from Barrons.

Among those named in the lawsuit, which alleges that celebrities endorsed a potential fraudand potentially promoted unregistered securitiesare football star Tom Brady, basketball icon Shaquille ONeal, and businessman Kevin OLeary. Representatives of none of the three immediately responded to requests for comment early on Wednesday.

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None of these Defendants performed any due diligence prior to marketing these FTX products to the public, the lawsuit alleges.

Swiftwho the Financial Times reported was courted by FTX to be among the groups celebrity ambassadorsmay have been the outlier.

The one person I found that did that was Taylor Swift, Moskowitz said on The Scoop podcast, in response to a question from host Frank Chaparro on why some celebrities didnt seem to talk to lawyers before signing contracts to make sure they would not be peddling unregistered securities.

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In our discovery Taylor Swift actually asked that: Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities? Moskowitz said.

It makes the music artist a rarity in choosing not to be linked with FTX, which not only attracted high-profile brand ambassadors but a body of venture-capital and pension fund investors. One, venture-capital powerhouse Sequoia Capital, wrote down its investment in FTX to zero before the exchange went bankrupt, noting that it had run a rigorous diligence process but was in the business of taking risk.

One of the worlds richest people, for his part, isnt shocked that Swift appears to have been skeptical about what the Financial Times reported was a sponsorship deal worth more than $100 million.

Im not surprised, Tesla

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Some of Swifts biggest tracks are Dont Blame Me, I Knew You Were Trouble, and Bad Blood.

Write to Jack Denton at jack.denton@barrons.com

See the original post:

Taylor Swift May Have Known FTX Was Trouble. Why Elon Musk Is Not Surprised. - Barron's