A cryptocurrency promoted in January by US first lady Melania Trump was part of a sophisticated fraud that “leveraged celebrity association and ‘borrowed fame’ to sell legitimacy to unsuspecting investors,” a new legal filing has alleged.

In April, crypto investors brought a federal class action lawsuit against Benjamin Chow, cofounder of crypto exchange Meteora, and Hayden Davis, cofounder of crypto venture capital firm Kelsier Labs, among other defendants, accusing them of a multimillion-dollar fraud involving a single memecoin, $M3M3.

Later, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, expanding the allegations to include racketeering activity. They claimed the pair had colluded to rig the market for $LIBRA, a coin promoted by Javier Milei , president of Argentina, which collapsed i

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