Nigerian singer Davido has become the latest celebrity to be involved in a rug-pull scheme reportedly orchestrated by Sahil Arora, an Indian national accused of several pump-and-dump operations.

With over 15.3 million followers on X and 7.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify, Davido launched a memecoin named “DAVIDO” on May 29. The launch featured the tagline: “The pump stops when time stops.”

According to chain tracker Lookonchain, DAVIDO was launched on the Solana memecoin generator pump.fun. The token address received 7.5 SOL as startup capital. Out of this, 7 SOL was used to buy 203 million DAVIDO, which made up 20.3% of the token’s total supply.

Davido then promoted the token to his followers on X, encouraging them to hold DAVIDO, stating that he expected the token to reach a $30 million market cap.

HODL HODL! WE ARE JUST STARTING! 30 MILLION SOON COME 🔥⏳✨

However, just 11 hours later, Davido sold 121.88M DAVIDO tokens for 2,791 SOL, approximately $474,000 at the time. Consequently, the token’s price plummeted over 90% from its all-time high of $0.003297. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $0.002343, down 37% from its peak.

Lookonchain also identified a transfer of 20 million DAVIDO tokens to an address labeled “dead1111…1111.” The price collapse has raised suspicions of a rug-pull orchestrated by Davido, who has not yet commented on the situation.

Celebrity-themed tokens have been under scrutiny recently, with several instances of these tokens being dumped on investors. For example, American media personality Caitlyn Jenner launched JENNER, another SOL-based meme coin on pump.fun. However, the token’s price crashed shortly after its launch when developers dumped large amounts of pre-acquired tokens.

It was later discovered that Sahil Arora was behind the incident, exploiting Jenner’s lack of cryptocurrency knowledge to profit from the token. Arora also raised over $300,000 in a token presale under the guise of Australian musician Iggy Azalea. The IGGY coin surged over 30,000% but ended up as another pump-and-dump scheme, now down over 70% from its all-time high.

American rapper “Rich the Kid” has also accused Arora of hacking his X account to promote a scam token named “RICH.”

Interestingly, a report revealed that Arora circulated a list of celebrities he claimed he could secure promotions for. The list included endorsement fees ranging from $6,000 to $315,000 for major names like Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, and Lindsay Lohan. Davido was also listed, priced at $8,000, raising the possibility that Arora could be behind the recent rug-pull incident involving Davido’s meme coin.

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