Vauld crisis turns up heat on finfluencers pitching crypto

livemint.com:

Angry questions are being asked of financial content creators, or ‘finfluencers’, who promoted Vauld, the Singapore-based crypto firm that suspended all its transactions on 4 July, leaving investors stranded.

“A lot of people, including college students, reached out to me saying they had put money in Vauld—anywhere between ₹3,000 and ₹80,000—after some finfluencers pitched it as a ‘crypto FD’ (fixed deposit) in their promotional videos," says equity investor Azhar Jafri. On Tuesday, in a tweet that now has over 1,000 retweets and 5,000 likes, Jafri called out four top YouTubers—P.R. Sundar, Ankur Warikoo, Akshat Shrivastava, and Anish Singh Thakur, who runs the channel Booming Bulls, for recklessly talking up Vauld. “Most of these creators put up a sales pitch for Vauld in the name of educational content. While some said crypto is a volatile market and should be a small part of your investment portfolio, they mentioned it in passing." Some even told their audience how to bypass crypto taxes, he adds. “It all seemed shady and irresponsible to me," says Jafri.

Fazal Ahamed agrees. The 34-year-old digital marketer in Toronto, who invested ₹1.5 lakh in Vauld’s ‘FDs’, said, “It is unfortunate that many were enticed by the confidence of financial influencers who even went live on YouTube to invest in Vauld." Another 22-year-old freelancer from Mumbai, who started using Vauld last year, also said the finfluencers’ endorsements “created an image of it being a safer exchange."

Some of the influencers facing increasing scrutiny have since released statements on their channel’s community section on YouTube, apologising to viewers who may have been affected. They also claimed that they, too, had invested money on the platform,