Insiders made millions from Justin Bieber's NFT project. His fans are down almost 90%.

Bieber, John Shahidi, and the Nelk Boys collaborated on at least two NFT promotion schemes without disclosures

Photo from GQ

Remember the NFT craze a few months back? People were spending tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars for cartoon images linked to blockchain tokens. These digital Pogs conferred blockchain-verified “ownership” of linked items to buyers. Influencers and celebrities got in on the game in a big way, obtaining “valuable” NFTs and sharing them on social media. Of course, as we and others have shown, these promotional efforts were usually a sham. It turned out that these influencers rarely paid for the NFTs themselves, instead receiving them for free as part of undisclosed marketing campaigns.

While most of the celebrities involved in these schemes appear to have been unwitting participants, a few of them were much more closely involved in these projects. One particularly egregious example is pop star and influencer Justin Bieber.

Back in February, Bieber garnered significant attention (and derision) from the media after he massively overpaid for a “Bored Ape Yacht Club” (BAYC) NFT, dumping $1.3 million on the purchase. We subsequently discovered that Bieber’s BAYC purchase was funded by proceeds from an NFT project called the “InBetweeners.” The InBetweeners project was a collection of 10,777 hand-drawn cartoon bears created by an artist named Gianpiero D’Alessandro, who had previously worked as a designer for Bieber’s merchandise.

Bieber’s apparent ownership in the project was not clearly disclosed publicly. When he received his first InBetweeners NFTs, he merely stated that he had “copped his first NFTs,” without disclosing any ownership interest in the project:

Bieber’s involvement drove massive attention to the project and thousands of the NFTs were minted by Bieber fans over the coming days. This generated millions of dollars in revenue. We tracked those funds, discovering that Bieber’s wallet was the largest single recipient of the proceeds from the project, receiving 916 Ether (worth $2.7 million at the time):

Flows of Ether from the InBetweeners sales to Bieber, Shahidi, and others

Another partner in the project was a close associate of Bieber, a man named John Shahidi. Shahidi is best-known as the manager for the “Nelk Boys.” This influencer group has built their brand through videos where they play stupid pranks and spend lots of money. Nelk’s creator/head influencer Kyle Forgeard, says Nelk’s main product is the “full send” lifestyle, which he defines as:

“It started out meaning party hard, but now it’s evolved into, ‘Any activity you do, give it your absolute best,’” Mr. Forgeard said. “If you’re in the gym, you got to full send in the gym.”

Nelk also has a tendency to get involved in shady deals: It has been established that they had undisclosed financial relationships with unlicensed offshore crypto casinos and fake giveaway scams. In fact, there has been so much controversy that there is an entire subreddit dedicated to the group’s various questionable dealings.

John Shahidi received over $1 million in Ether from the InBetweeners project to one of his wallet addresses. Shahidi subsequently identified InBetweeners as one of “our” NFT projects on his Twitter page:

Unsurprisingly, Nelk also got in on the action promoting InBetweeners:

KYLE @KyleForgeard

My NFTs aren’t working 😂

Kyle Foregard’s wallet held eight InBetweener NFTS. Two of them were provided free of charge by the inBetweeners project. Two more were transferred in from John Shahidi and another unknown wallet. Kyle also paid to mint four InBetweeners, using Ether drawn from Coinbase.

How did Bieber and Nelk end up working together? It turns out that the pair have worked together for almost a decade. Bieber partnered with Shahidi to promote their a selfie app called “Shots.” This company morphed into a video production company called “Shots Studios,” which eventually developed the Nelk project.

In all, over $8 million in Ether was transferred out of the InBetweeners project wallet. Roughly $2 million was sent to Coinbase, potentially to be cashed out to dollars. The remaining funds were split between a wallet identified as Gianpiero’s and to several other addresses we can’t attribute at this time.

Not a bad haul for selling a few cartoon bears…

Nelk ran their own NFT project and paid Justin Bieber to “buy in”

Not long after the success of the InBetweeners project, the Nelk team rapidly generated their own NFT project called “Full Send Metacard” (FSM). In addition to the NFT itself, token holders were promised “exclusive access” to Full Send company projects. This was like the InBetweeners project, which promised token holders special access to Bieber concerts and events.

It appears that the InBetweeners helped fund FSM. For example, Kyle Forgeard paid 7 Eth to mint 2 FSM tokens (shown above) The money for the minting fees came from John Shahidi’s wallet less than one hour before the transactions were completed:

Similarly, Justin Bieber received 8.5 Eth from another Shahidi-controlled wallet just prior to his “purchase” of a FSM NFT for 6.4 Eth:

This didn’t stop the FSM social media team from hyping Bieber’s purchase!

It is interesting to note that after this transfer was publicly identified, Shahidi quickly changed the name of the account in an attempt to hide the transaction. It’s almost like they know what they are doing is wrong…

And how did this work out for fans who bought in?

About as well as you might expect.

When InBetweeners launched, they charged 0.45 Ether to “mint” an NFT. This was equivalent to roughly $1600 at the time. Shortly after the minting event, the price of the NFTs skyrocketed on Opensea, the largest platform for buying and selling NFTs:

Price and volume of InBetweeners sales on Opensea

As of the date of publication, the best offer on Opensea was 0.18 Ether, worth about $200 today. In Ether terms, this is 60% under the original price. In dollar terms, this is a decrease of ~87.5%. And this is only for people who bought in at the beginning; some poor suckers paid as much as 2.3 Ether (~$7,000) for the privilege of owning an InBetweeners NFT.

The lack of transparency surrounding these projects allowed influencers like Bieber to pretend to play the NFT game using other people’s money. They took no personal financial risks while creating hype that encouraged their fans to speculate on worthless digital trinkets. And in doing so, they fleeced the very people who admired and trusted them the most.