Everyone should have noticed by now that cryptocurrencies are a highly risky business.

Of course you can get rich with them, but you can also lose a lot of money.

Keith Johnson in particular felt the point of the losses.

A lawsuit was filed in his name in a federal court in Manhattan in June, including against Tesla founder Elon Musk.

The allegation reads: “The accused have known since 2019 that Dogecoin has no value, but nevertheless promoted Dogecoin to profit from its trading.”

Franz Nestler

Editor in Business.

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At the time, Johnson was demanding $86 billion for Musk's personal enrichment and another $172 billion in compensation for lost profits -- a total of $258 billion.

For comparison: the total amount would roughly correspond to half of the German federal budget.

The requested payment is 32 times the current market cap of the $8 billion hoax cryptocurrency and nearly triple the market cap at the time of the record high of $88.68 billion in mid-2021.

In addition, the Dogecoin is to be classified as gambling, so that Musk also violated gambling laws: "Because the plaintiff and the co-plaintiffs were not warned before trading the Dogecoin that it was nothing more than gambling, the plaintiff and the co-plaintiffs seeking a refund of all stakes lost as a result of trading Dogecoin.”

In addition, Musk and all of his companies are to be banned from advertising or using Dogecoin in any form: It is currently possible to buy Dogecoin t-shirts or mugs in the fan shops of Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring Company for a fee.

As if that weren't enough, the charges have now been expanded: not only have seven new investors joined them, but six new suspects are now being accused, including the Dogecoin Foundation.

Musk doesn't appear to be taking the lawsuit very seriously.

The multi-billionaire has now released his own perfume – which of course you can pay for with Dogecoin, as he emphasized on the social network Twitter.

Shortly after the lawsuit became known, he wrote there that he would “continue to support Dogecoin”.

In an interview, he explained why: The people who worked for SpaceX and Tesla would ask him to do it again and again.

Why he actually does this remains unclear: in early May 2022, the Dogecoin price crashed after the Tesla boss had described the motto as a scam in a sketch on the comedy show “Saturday Night Live”.

The price dropped from 74 cents back then to around 6 cents now.

The billionaire has not yet been able to satisfactorily explain why Musk himself describes something as a scam that he uses as a means of payment.