Rob Gronkowski has been issued a subpoena for the class-action lawsuit against Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and the franchise for the promotion of cryptocurrency brokerage Voyager Digital, according to court documents obtained by The Athletic.
The NFL veteran is a brand ambassador for the now-bankrupt company. At the time of publication, Gronkowski has not been listed as a defendant in the case. However, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Adam Moskowitz, said in a statement to the outlet, “He is not a named defendant yet, but the court gave us until Feb. 24 to file an amended complaint against Voyager (such as adding defendants, claims and plaintiffs), we know he was a ‘Brand Ambassador’ for Voyager who ‘promoted’ the unsecured securities (the ‘interest accounts’). We served him with a third-party subpoena, and we have named all of the FTX ‘Brand Ambassadors’ in our pending federal class action.”
The FTX proceedings mentioned refer to a separate class-action lawsuit filed against Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Naomi Osaka, Larry David, Shohei Ohtani and Shaquille O’Neal, to name a few notable figures. That lawsuit claims these individuals, among others, “either controlled, promoted, assisted in, and actively participated” in the alleged scheme where they “aggressively marketed” FTX. The filing describes the company as “truly a house of cards, a Ponzi scheme where the FTX Entities shuffled customer funds between their opaque affiliated entities, using new investor funds obtained through investments in the YBAs and loans to pay interest to the old ones and to attempt to maintain the appearance of liquidity.”
The lawsuit against the Mavs and Cuban follows a similar thread, calling Voyager Digital “unregulated and unsustainable fraud, similar to other Ponzi schemes” that “specifically target[s] young and inexperienced investors,” according to Forbes.
Voyager stopped withdrawals and trading on July 1, 2022, and filed for Chapter 11 just a few days later. According to The Athletic, the court ruled Cuban can be deposed next month. His involvement allegedly went beyond just the team sponsorship, as he also joined cryptocurrency conferences.
