Basketball great Shaquille O’Neal has finally been served papers as part of a class-action lawsuit against celebrities who promoted failed crypto exchange FTX, according to crypto news website The Block.
Lawyers for the FTX investor who brought the case, Edwin Garrison, have accused O’Neal of “hiding and driving away from our process servers for the past three months”.
“It is really astonishing the measures he has gone to avoid service of our complaint,” Garrison’s lawyer Adam Moskowitz told Forbes in a March email.
O’Neal is one of several celebrities being sued for promoting FTX, which went bankrupt last November. Others listed as defendants in the case include NBA star Steph Curry, NFL star Tom Brady and his former wife, model Gisele Bundchen, and Seinfeld creator Larry David.
O’Neal was the last celebrity to be served when he was finally tracked down outside his Atlanta home on Sunday.
“We just served personally Shaquille O’Neal outside his house with a copy of our complaint at 4pm,” Moskowitz said in an email to The Block.
“We took Judge Moore’s instructions very seriously and are glad to finally end this silly sideshow.”
Garrison claims he opened a crypto account with FTX after being “exposed to celebrity endorsements”.
The lawsuit also claims the defendants never disclosed how much they were paid to promote FTX.
O’Neal partnered with FTX for a Super Bowl party at his annual music festival Shaq’s Fun House in February 2022.
“A lot of people think I’m involved, but I was just a paid spokesperson for a commercial,” O’Neal told CNBC in December.
FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in December and will stand trial in October on 13 charges relating to his firm’s collapse. Bankman-Fried has so far pleaded not guilty to eight of the charges.
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*Note that the portrait image heading this article is AI-generated, based on Shaquille O’Neal’s likeness (Polemos/MidJourney)
