Arnold Haro held up a single bullet to his cellphone camera, loaded it into his Smith & Wesson and spun the chamber.
It was 3:28 p.m. on Feb. 21, and he was in his ranch home in an isolated corner of California. He seemed in distress, scratching his scalp, breathing heavily. “If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a meme coin,” he told his followers on X, where he was livestreaming.
About three hours later, his dying wish came true. A crypto token named after Haro’s social media handle skyrocketed to more than $2 million in total value, before crashing back to earth. It wasn’t an isolated event. A gold rush ensued, and dozens of other copycat coins sprang up, some branded with stills from the livestream, as the meme coin community tried to profit on Haro’s suicide.
Meme coins started out as a joke in 2013 with the rise of dogecoin, a digital token meant as a sendup of the crypto world. Over time, an online subculture developed around the idea that any cultural moment could merit its own cryptocurrency. Tokens tied to celebrities, political leaders and anonymous edgelords hit the market, carrying no intrinsic value while hyping internet memes and personalities.
The marketplace has grown into a multibillion-dollar slice of the wider $2.8 trillion crypto market. But it has also proven to be a hotbed of scams—a world of boom-and-bust speculation where coin creators reap fortunes and everyone else is left holding worthless symbols of a brief digital supernova. Federal authorities have treated memecoins as entertainment, not securities, meaning that many of the protections available to investors in traditional assets don’t apply.
The coins created in the wake of Haro’s death illustrate, in the extreme, the lack of boundaries in the meme coin world: It is a place where anything can be turned into a coin—even a horrific tragedy.
Maria Lucero Haro, Haro’s sister, said his immediate family had no comment on the events leading up to his death. “My brother’s death will no longer be anybody’s news line or entertainment,” she said.
The 23-year-old’s crypto wallet showed that he was a prolific trader in memes and nonfungible tokens, particularly those on the Solana blockchain, since last summer.
By the time Haro died, digital markets had been on a year-long run. In January, bitcoin reached all-time highs above $106,000, with crypto enthusiasts and the Trump administration proclaiming a legitimized future. Meme coins were a growing part of that, including one from Trump.
But there are so many pump-and-dump schemes in meme coins that they have a term for them: the “rug pull.”
Haro kept getting rugged, adding to a combustible situation.
He lived in a rural stretch outside Fresno, Calif., with his sisters and mother, a housecleaner. A neighbor said they kept to themselves, and family members described him as a goofball.
According to police records, he worked in the solar industry. He had a 1-year-old daughter with his girlfriend, with whom he no longer lived. He drove a silver Ford F-150 and a BMW X6 SUV.
In addition to his normal job, he sold drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine to homeless people near a riverbank, his ex-girlfriend told police, according to records. He was also a user, and had been recovering from a fentanyl overdose in 2020 that was so severe he had to learn how to walk and talk again, she told police.
Under his handle, MistaFuccYou, he posted extreme memes and racial slurs. He bragged about collecting guns, taking oxycodone, and being banned from a steakhouse for stiffing a waiter. He had become something of a meme himself after a video of him spinning around and vomiting got him labeled on social media as the “360 puke guy.”
The signs of his crypto losses were all over his social accounts.
He asked for a crypto influencer, known for hyping meme coins, to return $8 when the account didn’t post enough.
In January, he said he had borrowed money to buy the coins launched by President Trump and first lady Melania Trump.
“I promised my parents generational wealth for a hefty loan to buy $trump and now it’s down,” Haro posted on Jan. 19. “I just bought some melania too but knowing my luck it’s prob not going to go any where.”
Both coins have lost most of their worth after a brief surge in popularity, with Trump’s token down 86% after reaching nearly $15 billion in market value. Haro also bought a Trump-token copycat that quickly became worthless.
On Jan. 27, he messaged another crypto trader on X that he lost his last $500 on a coin that appeared to be associated with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
Meanwhile, his time in the illegal drug trade was seemingly spiraling out of control. His ex-girlfriend told police that he had sold a Mexican dealer two stolen cars in exchange for a large amount of marijuana, according to the police records. Haro told his ex that the dealer was threatening to kill him, she said, according to the records. Haro also was upset to find out that she was also seeing someone else, according to the police records.
“Arnold owed a lot of people a lot of money and was very stressed and anxious about it,” according to a police report that summarized an interview with his ex-girlfriend.
No one can say what caused Haro to pull the trigger, and police records didn’t indicate that he left behind any note or explanation.
“I’m calling because my daughter’s father did a livestream on his social-media account playing Russian roulette,” she told a dispatcher at about 5:03 p.m., according to audio recording and police records. “I don’t know if it’s real or not.”
By 5:43 p.m., police officers reported a male subject was found on the property with a gunshot wound to the head. His mother was outside the house, crying hysterically.
Six days after Haro’s death, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a statement saying that cryptocurrencies like those made in Haro’s image weren’t its problem. “Meme coins typically are purchased for entertainment, social interaction, and cultural purposes,” the agency said, comparing them to collectors’ items. Speculation, it added, drives their value.
Moments before he died, Haro asked for any meme coins that came out of his death to be sent to his Solana wallet, according to an archived version of the video.
These practically worthless crypto tokens continue to haunt his family.
Coins linked to Haro’s death proliferated on Pump.Fun, a site that lets users mint meme coins about as rapidly as Tumblr made blogs. Some have an avatar of a still image taken from the livestream, where Haro, with his eyes closed, holds the gun against his head. Others use his X profile picture, or a picture from the video of him vomiting.
The most popular token, trading under the ticker MISTA, soared to more than $2 million in total value then crashed to half of that value in one day. It is now trading around $80,000.
“Mr. Haro’s death is a tragedy,” a spokesman for Pump.Fun said in a statement. “Pump had no role in this series of events beyond being the platform on which someone created and launched a crypto token related to the news, clearly in poor taste.”
Some coin creators are claiming that they are raising money for Haro’s family and sent coins to Haro’s wallet, but it is unclear if his family can access it. The user who created the Mista coin claimed to have donated $5,000 to a GoFundMe to cover funeral expenses.
