The National Basketball Association (NBA) and lawyers representing collapsed crypto lender Voyager Digital have been hit with a lawsuit over the promotion and defense of the firm that investors say led to $4.2 billion in losses.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, alleges the NBA was “grossly negligent” when Mark Cuban, the former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, struck a marketing deal with Voyager.

It claims that the NBA accepted billions in promotional compensation as Covid left the association with “empty arenas and the loss of billions in television revenues.” It added that the NBA leveraged its “global reputation and trust in the NBA brand,” to promote the selling of unregistered and illegal securities to the public.

McCarter & English LLP, the law firm that represented Voyager, was alleged to have “produced fraudulent legal opinions” while maintaining Voyager was operating “entirely above board.”

Read more: DoJ appeals against Voyager asset deal with Binance US

Cuban was sued by Voyager investors shortly after the lender went bankrupt in 2022. He was accused of shilling Voyager Digital’s unregistered securities and contributing to the loss of billions in a Ponzi-style scheme.

McCarter & English reportedly said it will “vigorously defend the firm, which provided clear and competent advice to our clients.”

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Billionaire investor Mark Cuban fell victim to a phishing attack on Saturday after reportedly downloading a fake MetaMask application that caused him to lose almost $900,000 in crypto assets. 

Cuban was unaware of the hack until DLNews approached him. He told the outlet, “I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some sh*t in it.”

“MetaMask crashed a couple times. I just stopped,” Cuban explained. “Then you [DL News] emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account.” 

His wallet was previously inactive for five months. He reportedly saved himself $2.5 million worth of Polygon tokens when he moved them to a Coinbase address. 

“I went on MetaMask for the first time in months,” Cuban said. “They must have been watching.”

Crypto sleuth WazzCrypto was the first on X (formally Twitter) to first notice that $870,000 of staked ETH (stETH), Tether USD (USDT), Matic tokens (MATIC), Rarible (RARI), USD Coin (USDC), and various Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains had all been transferred from Cuban’s wallet. 

Read more: How billionaire Mark Cuban got revenge on DeFi with KlimaDAO

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin saw his X account hacked this month, resulting in a series of phishing links being shared under his name. Victims of the scam lost around $691,000 worth of crypto assets, mainly consisting of NFTs.

Another phishing attack involving Retool and Fortress Trust occurred just last week. The hacker tricked a Retool employee into clicking a malicious link and giving up their multi-factor authentication codes through the use of a deepfake voice and information on his place of work to mimic his employees. $15 million in crypto was lost. 

Update September 18, 16:54 UTC: A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin lost $691,000 worth of crypto assets as part of a phishing attack.

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Outspoken Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban says that smart contracts and apps are the reason he invested so much of his money into crypto and that what’s required is a ‘ubiquitous’ app that’s needed by everyone.

Cuban made the comments on Sunday in a Twitter thread. He further claimed that the value of a crypto token is determined by the apps it can run and its overall usefulness.

The thread also made an interesting comparison between the current state of smart contracts and primitive music streaming.

According to Cuban, the way things are at the moment is akin to music lovers being required to use a dial-up modem, internet subscription, provider client, and streaming client. Even with all this, he says, it’s likely you’d have been “laughed at for just not turning on your radio or TV.”

The answer, he says, is in an app that everybody can learn to use.

“What has not been created is an application that is ubiquitous,” he says. “One that is obviously needed by everyone and they are willing to go through the learning curve to use,” (our emphasis).

However, he also says he believes that such an app may never come.

Read more: Mark Cuban and Voyager chief ran crypto ‘Ponzi scheme,’ lawsuit claims

Cuban’s not as clued-up on crypto as he’d have us believe

Despite his reputation as a savvy investor and businessman, billionaire Cuban has a mixed history where crypto’s concerned. While he often talks about his investments in ether and bitcoin, he’s also fallen foul of some of the biggest disasters in recent years.

Indeed, earlier this year, Protos reported how Cuban saw his investment in carbon credit project Kilma DAO go down the tubes when it shed 97% of value just three months after launch.

He also pumped $300,000 into decentralized finance (DeFi) project Olympus DAO, which also crashed, losing over 80% of its value in under a year.

Cuban was also rugged when he invested in algorithmic stablecoin Titan – he says he didn’t do his research – and has had a rocky time with other crypto investments that are thought to have included lending protocol Aave, decentralized exchange token Sushi, and Litecoin.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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A new lawsuit claims Mark Cuban played a pivotal role in shilling now-defunct Voyager Digital’s unregistered securities, duping investors in a ‘Ponzi scheme’ that lost them billions.

Voyager was “as close to risk free as you’re gonna get in the crypto universe,” according to Cuban, who campaigned hard to drive traffic to the crypto lender’s platform. The billionaire’s own basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, even offered $100 in bitcoin to those who download the app and deposit $100 of their own cash.

Only, Voyager went bankrupt in June. Investors want answers.

In a proposed securities class action filed on Wednesday, a host of plaintiffs say Voyager Digital chief Stephen Ehrlich and Cuban facilitated and furthered the firm’s “false and misleading promises of reaping large profits in the cryptocurrency market.”

It claims Voyager’s Earn Program Accounts, or EPAs, were unregistered securities the company continued to flog even after seven states banned its sale. Cuban and Ehrlich repeatedly made inflated and false statements about the safety associated with investing in Voyager in order to avoid bankruptcy, according to plaintiffs.

• Cuban persistently touted Voyager as safe, even admitting he had his own money invested.
• Cuban allegedly failed to disclose the nature or scope of compensation he and the Dallas Mavericks received for shilling the platform.
• In October, the Mavs and Voyager signed a five-year deal which included naming the basketball team’s Mavs Gaming Hub, the venue for their NBA 2K League team.

Read more: How billionaire Mark Cuban got revenge on DeFi with KlimaDAO

The lawsuit further accuses Ehrlich of inflating Voyager’s insurance status. He told investors their assets were “as safe as if they were in a bank” — leading the public to believe they were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), just like a bank. When the FDIC and Federal Reserve board caught wind of the false claims, they ordered Voyager to stop making “false of misleading statements.”

Plaintiffs are pursuing charges for aiding and abetting fraud, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty, civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment and violations of several state securities and business laws, and more. 

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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