In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin

0:00A quick warning. This episode discusses suicide. Please take care while listening.

0:12Oh my god.

0:18In late February, a man started a live stream on X. He's on his phone. You see him, he's wearing a white t-shirt, he's got gold chains on. And he starts talking to the camera. The man's name? Arnold Harrow. You can see that he's feeling much more anxiety as it's going on. He's, like, scratching his head. Then Harrow holds a bullet up to the camera. Then he puts the bullet into the chamber of Smith & Wesson, and he spins the chamber, and he looks at it. And you can see that he's in a lot of distress. Haro was playing Russian roulette and then he made a request to his followers If I die I hope you guys turn this into a meme coin

1:32Haro killed himself on that livestream. He was 23 years old. And in a matter of hours, his dying request, turn this into a meme coin, came true. Someone created a meme coin that was named after his social media handle. And very quickly, that coin took off. The cryptocurrency named after Haro skyrocketed in value to$2 million. Our colleague Kevin Dugan covers the culture of finance. He heard about Haru's suicide earlier this year. And it surprised him how easily a tragedy like this could be transformed into an asset. There's already this infrastructure that's available that can just take something, take anything, and financialize it.

2:25And to me, this felt genuinely new. And it felt like it was something much darker than I had ever really seen before. And that was why I wanted to kind of explore this and see what was actually happening.

2:45Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, May 1st.

2:59Coming up on the show, the seedy underbelly of meme coins, where anything is for sale.

3:21Arnold Haro lived in Central California. He worked in the solar industry and had a one-year-old daughter with an ex-girlfriend. Arnold's family described him as a goofball, someone who was very generous, someone who, as recently as Valentine's Day, was sending money to family members who needed it. To get a better picture of Haro's life, Kevin spoke to his family and reviewed police records. Haro's sister disputes some of the information in those police records, but declined to get specific. A few things from those interviews and records stood out to Kevin. According to police reports, Haru's ex-girlfriend said that he was a part-time drug dealer and user.

4:04And according to his family, Haru struggled with depression. So it seemed like he had a little bit of a volatile life. That was offline. But online, on X, Haru's life was also pretty volatile. He had a bit of a following. I think some of what he was known for was a little bit of his edgy humor. He liked to push buttons. And he would do that sometimes by using a lot of language that could include racial slurs and things like that. There's one video that went mildly viral in some parts of Twitter where he was spinning around and throwing up. And he was called the 360 puke guy. So that was the kind of level of humor that he was involved in.

5:02On X, Haru often posted about trades he made on the crypto market, particularly meme coins. Meme coins are a fast-growing part of crypto. They first started way back in 2013 with an image of a smiling, animated dog. So the first meme coin was Dogecoin. And it started off as a joke. The whole project of Doge was a little bit of like, look, you can create something that has no intrinsic value. And instead of becoming worthless and just being something to laugh about online, it actually accumulated a lot of value because it was just a joke. You might have bought Doge as a joke, but today the price is no joke.

5:46Dogecoin hit a record high. It's now a top 10 cryptocurrency in the world. with a market cap of about$40 billion. And so from there, you start seeing more and more meme coins pop up. By some estimates, meme coins have grown to over$60 billion in value. They've become so mainstream that even President Trump and the First Lady have meme coins. They launched them earlier this year. Kevin says many traders create and buy meme coins in the hopes of striking it rich fast. let's say there's a joke on twitter that you know there's some viral cartoon or something that's just going around and you're early you see it and you think you know what i want to make a meme coin out of this and you go on a site where you can create it really quickly all of a sudden all the other people who are kind of in on the joke they want to get in on had two.

6:49Like one that was created in the last few months, it's something called Fartcoin. Okay. Okay. So Fartcoin is, it does not extend much beyond the name. I think I get the concept. Right. So, but it has$565 million market cap as I'm talking right now. For a fart. Right. Look, and this is the level of humor that we're talking about here, but it's worth half a billion dollars. And it's, what is it? Well, and presumably, if you were hip to the fart joke early, you could buy your farts and sell them, and maybe you'd have like a nice little bag of change then. Yes, exactly. Since I talked to Kevin, Fartcoin's market cap has actually grown to over a billion dollars.

7:40The coin was created on a particularly popular site in the world of meme coins. Enter PumpFun. PumpFun is a marketplace where people can sell, buy, and make meme coins really quickly. It started in 2024. And essentially what it does is it allows you to create cryptocurrencies, meme coins specifically, about as easily as you could create a blog on Tumblr, You just click a button, you add a picture, you put in a name, and it doesn't take much more than that. And all of a sudden, you can start having a cryptocurrency based off an internet joke trading to anybody who wants to buy it. Within seconds?

8:27Yeah, just about. Can you show me what this looks like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's the app. The first thing you see on PumpFun is a pop-up asking you to certify that you're at least 18 years old before entering the site. Once you're in, the site itself is pretty lo-fi. It has a black background with bright green accents. There are moving GIFs, emojis, and colorful tickers logging new transactions. And the site is littered with offensive user-generated images and slurs. Like the N-word. It's everywhere. It's like I need to wash my eyeballs now. Yeah, you see a lot of that. I mean, it's incredible just the number.

9:10Yes. There were thousands of these coins created. Most of them don't really amount to much. But a lot of times you will see a spike because the joke or the meme itself has, you know, it's grabbing attention. in a lot of ways to grab attention is just through, you know, something racist or something extremely objectionable.

9:38We know Haro spent a lot of time on PumpFun. He hoped to become rich from trading meme coins, but wasn't very successful. On his Twitter, he talked about borrowing money from his family in order to buy Trump's meme coins. And he was hoping to create what he called generational wealth. And it didn't seem like he was doing very well. A lot of what he bought seemed to have lost a lot of value. In January, about a month before the live stream, Haro lost money on Trump's meme coin. On X, he posted, quote, I just bought some Alania too, but knowing my luck, it's probably not going to go anywhere. Haro also bought a copycat of Trump's coin.

10:22That tanked. About a week later, he messaged another trader on X that he'd lost his last$500 on a meme coin supposedly associated with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Haro's dream of getting rich was going nowhere. But soon, other traders would be making money on him. That's next.

11:01Sheriff's Office, do you want to break this year? Can you hold?

11:06About an hour after Haro killed himself, his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his daughter, called the police. How can I help you, ma 'am? Hi, I'm going. It's my daughter's father. She was just coming off of work. She checked her phone, saw his Twitter account, and then saw that the video was still up at that point. So was he actually, like, did you see a gun, or? Yes, the gun is in the video. The gun went off in the live stream. She didn't know if it was a stunt. and the 911 operator soon sent up police to check on the residents.

12:00So what we know about Arnold's life at that point was that he was under a lot of stress and a lot of financial stress. The reason why we know this is in part from his publicly available crypto wallet. but we also know from police records. According to those records, earlier this year, Haro sold two cars to a Mexican drug dealer. Those cars were stolen, and the drug dealer was very, very unhappy about this and had threatened to kill him. So we know that this was happening around the time that he did the live stream.

12:42Soon after the live stream, MemeCoin's referencing Haro's suicide proliferated on PumpFun. The most popular coin traded under the ticker Mista, a reference to Haro's X account. It also used his profile picture, an image of Haro with his hand over his face. For a short time, Mista was a hit among meme coin traders. It did fit from a certain angle within the culture of this community, right? Because it was extreme, and it was obviously very online. There were people afterwards who were obviously shocked and horrified by this, but there were also a lot of people who, I mean, they were trading it.

13:26There are hundreds, hundreds of people who have bought and sold this coin. And while, again, this is a drop in the bucket, you do get a sense that there are a lot of people out there who just have no compunction one way or another. about what this means or what kind of effect this can have on this person's family or just somebody else who might be contemplating the same thing.

14:00And do you know if Haro's family has seen any money from these coins? Someone said that they had sent a bunch of the meme coins to Arnold's wallet. another person said that they were creating meme coins in order for the family to make some kind of profit or fund their funeral. But soon after, I had talked to some family members. That did not seem to be the case. They got any kind of money. Haro's sister told Kevin that the family had no comment on the events leading up to Haro's death. She said, quote, quote, my brother's death will no longer be anyone's news line or entertainment. Is PumpFun moderating this site in any way?

14:48Like, what have they said about that? The company claims that they do have some filters in place. Again, you were just looking at this. I don't know what those filters exactly are. In a statement, a spokesman for PumpFun said, quote, Mr. Harrow's death is a tragedy. Pump had no role in the series of events beyond being the platform on which someone created and launched a crypto token related to the news, clearly in poor taste. As for the government, the Securities and Exchange Commission, one agency tasked with regulating crypto, has so far declined to regulate meme coins. Six days after Haro's death, the SEC said, quote, meme coins typically are purchased for entertainment, social interaction, and cultural purposes.

15:35The SEC hasn't said anything about Haro's death. To the extent that they've talked about meme coins, they say that they are really closer to collectibles, you know, comparing them to something like baseball cards. And that they are, you know, that they're not funding any kind of company. They're fundamentally different from a stock or a bond. What do you make of that, this distinction between something that's a security and something that's entertainment? Because it feels like it could be a bit squishy. it's pretty squishy this debate has been going on for years and years and years but the idea here is that if you are raising money through a cryptocurrency sale and that money is being used to fund the operations of a company then that should count as a security right When it comes to meme coins, what is this money for?

16:44There is no company. There is no project. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's an online joke. So they say meme coins, not our problem. Yes.

16:57After reporting and writing this story, what sticks with you the most? I think what I've taken from this story is that the meme coin markets have had this role here in extending the grief and the pain around the end of Arnold's life. So what you're seeing here is that someone who met tragedy, and now you have this coin created by some other person in the world. and now it's part of a casino, right? It's something that you can buy and sell and bet on and have as part of your portfolio. I don't know if that is a fluke or if, like, some people in the crypto world are thinking that this is kind of like how things are going, that this is what the future is going to look like.

17:57Really? That you can take any idea, anything, and then turn it into an asset that you can make money off of. And no one can tell you that you can't. And you can sell it to anyone in the world, and you can become a millionaire. Right? I think that's what's sticking with me. There's this ambiguity about the future and about the way that we live our lives. and how it can be transmuted into some financial-ish token. And that can outlive us.

18:50If you or anyone you know is struggling, you can reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 988. That's 988.

19:04That's all for today, Thursday, May 1st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.