Jack Doherty: $2,400 In, $213,000 Out on a Coin He Swore He'd Never Sell

At 10:59 on the night of Saturday 26 September 2026, Miami time, Jack Doherty made a promise to his 129,000 followers on X. "Looks like I got to do a big giveaway tmrw since we hit $1m market cap on $JACK," he wrote. "Let's hit $10m by the morning and I'll 10x the giveaway amount! RT and let's keep growing this! IM NEVER SELLING."

Less than four hours later, at 2:44 a.m., the coin lost 86% of its value in one minute, falling from $6.14 million to $846,000, according to minute-by-minute prices on GeckoTerminal. Public trade data on FOMO, a trading app on which every user's trades can be seen, showed that Doherty had put about $2,400 into $JACK and sold out with a profit of about $213,060. A week later the whole coin was valued at about $107,000, 98% below its peak of $6.68 million.

Doherty, 22, is a Miami-based streamer with more than 15 million YouTube subscribers who now broadcasts on Kick, a live-streaming site similar to Twitch. On 27 September Stephen Findeisen, the YouTube investigator known as Coffeezilla, went through the trades on his second channel, voidzilla. "You could see in the green where he bought low before anyone else got in," he said, as reported by Sportskeeda. "There couldn't be a simpler scam than this... You knew he was going to do this. Nobody should be surprised."

Doherty has not been charged with any crime over $JACK or any of his earlier coins. Calling it a scam or a "rug pull", crypto slang for promoters draining a coin and leaving buyers holding something worthless, is an allegation made by Coffeezilla and by traders on X.

What $JACK was

$JACK is a memecoin: a token with no company, earnings or assets behind it, whose price depends only on how many people want to buy it. Buying one is closer to buying a raffle ticket than a share. It was created on Pump.fun, a website where anyone can mint a coin on the Solana blockchain in about a minute, at 1:45 p.m. on 26 September, according to trading-pool records on GeckoTerminal. That was 48 minutes after Doherty posted "Just made a Fomo account... what meme coins should I buy?" and, two minutes later, "Need to turn this $10k into $1m."

Pump.fun sells a new coin along a fixed price curve until enough money has come in, then moves it to an open market called PumpSwap, much like a small company graduating from a private placement to a stock exchange listing. $JACK graduated at 8:36 that evening. Within the hour Doherty was promoting it by name. "Never selling my Jack Doherty coin holding forever," he wrote at 9:26 p.m. "It's going to go crazy once I knock the island boys out October 16th," a reference to a boxing match against Kodiyak Redd of the rap duo Island Boys on a Brand Risk Promotions card in Miami.

He also offered money. He promised $10,000 "once $JACK hits $1M market cap or if I hit 10,000 followers on fomo", $100 to anyone who signed up to FOMO with his referral code (an introducer link, as brokers use) and sent proof, and a $1,000 giveaway to ten people who used it. On 1 October he wrote that Paid, a service that forwards a Pump.fun coin's "creator fees" (a small cut of every trade) to a named X account in dollars, was sending those fees to him: "as long as they keep sending me fees, i'll keep onboarding people onto $JACK." Doherty has not said who created the coin. He called it "my Jack Doherty coin".

How an influencer coin is drained

The pattern Coffeezilla described has three steps. None involves hacking anything.

©Photo: Rebel Wisdom, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

First, buy before the audience knows. A new memecoin starts at a tiny valuation, so a few thousand dollars buys a large slice of its billion tokens. Doherty's position on FOMO cost about $2,400.

Second, announce. Fans, and the automated trading bots that watch celebrity accounts, rush in. Every purchase pushes the price up, because the coin trades against a pool of cash that only grows when somebody pays in, so the early holder's paper fortune grows with every new buyer. "Up over $100k first day on FOMO and we're not stopping here LETS GOOO," Doherty posted at 10:40 p.m.

Third, sell into the buying. The only cash in the pool is the cash later buyers put there. When the biggest early holder sells, the price drops by the size of the sale, and everyone who bought on the way up holds a coin worth a fraction of what they paid. On a stock exchange this is a pump and dump, the scheme behind the boiler-room penny-stock frauds of the 1990s.

$JACK followed the script. Through the early hours of Sunday its market value climbed from about $2 million at 2 a.m. to $6.68 million at 2:43 a.m. In the next minute it was worth $846,000. Traders who follow FOMO's public trade feed said the collapse came when Doherty sold. Coffeezilla compared him to gravity: "He keeps saying he's never selling, but like gravity, this guy, he exploits us. He extracts; he takes wealth away." About $12.9 million of $JACK changed hands on its main PumpSwap pool on 27 September (UTC), and about 6,500 wallets still held it afterwards, KuCoin News counted. No analytics firm has published a total for buyers' losses. Anyone who bought in the final hour before the sale paid a valuation of between $2 million and $6.7 million for a coin that has since traded near $100,000.

"The $200k"

©CMZ chart. Data: Coffeezilla via Sportskeeda, FOMO, GeckoTerminal

His next post after the sale, at 5:48 p.m. on Sunday, asked: "Should I go live on kick and start trading meme coins?" It did not mention the sale.

Late on 30 September he returned to $JACK, posting more than 20 times in three hours. He promised SOL, the Solana network's own currency, to holders who showed proof, said he was paying $5,000 to fly a $JACK banner over Miami, and put the coin on his TikTok story. "I'm doing this to make it up to everyone," he wrote. "I don't need your money, I just want a good reputation in the space." The market value jumped from about $47,000 to a high of about $667,000 within two hours, then slid back.

The next afternoon he posted: "It's funny how people think I'm going to sell $JACK... THAT IS NEVER HAPPENING I HAVE DIAMOND HANDS." About 80 minutes later he asked his followers: "Should I buy back the $200k into $JACK?" To a critic who asked when people would stop sending him money, he replied: "Sorry hater we're too busy getting rich, stay poor bud." No response from Doherty to Coffeezilla's video had been reported by 4 October, and he has not explained the sale. On 3 October $JACK was worth about $107,000.

He has done this before

In October 2024 Doherty crashed a McLaren 570S on a Miami highway while streaming, and Kick banned him. Weeks later, during a broadcast on X, he appeared to search for a coin named McLaren on Raydium, a Solana trading venue. Its price spiked and then collapsed as the stream ended, and by 23 November 2024 he was trending on X and Reddit over it. Cointelegraph reported that he allegedly bought MCLAREN with several wallets before promoting it, then deleted his posts about it. A Reddit user on r/CryptoCurrency described it: "He had his other wallets buy first, then pretended to look for a coin and typed his own after a while." Within days he was promoting more coins. UNILAD Tech, citing the commentary channel Atozy, reported at least three, with Doherty promising "I'm not selling it until it's at $100 million market cap". None got past about 1% of that.

In July 2025 a "Jack Doherty" coin launched on Pump.fun around his first stream on the site was drained for about $6,000, traders on X said, and a follow-up called "Jack Doherty says Sorry" for about $200. Accounts on X put his take across all his coins at $500,000 to $640,000, without a published wallet-by-wallet breakdown.

Coffeezilla saved some of his scepticism for the buyers. "I do believe a lot of these people are themselves kind of scammers, like trying to get in on the grift," he said. "They want to sell before Jack sells."