(Bloomberg) — Popular stock influencer Keith Gill, better known as “Roaring Kitty,” has been sued for allegedly orchestrating a “pump and dump” scheme involving GameStop Corp. stock.
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Gill, who rose to fame promoting GameStop during the meme stock craze of 2021, resurfaced in May and again began posting about the game retailer on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
In a proposed class action lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, GameStop shareholder Martin Radev alleges that Gill sought to manipulate the stock for his own benefit.
Gill did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The lawsuit alleges that Gill purchased 120,000 call options on GameStop before he began posting about the company in May. The stock, which had been trading around $17 just before Gill began posting, soared to $48.75 on May 14.
On June 2, he disclosed that he owned 5 million GameStop shares and 120,000 call options that expired on June 21. By June 13, Gill’s holdings had grown to more than 9 million GameStop shares with no outstanding call options.
Gill “quietly sold and/or exercised (i.e., disposed of) his 120,000 GameStop call options for a large profit, ostensibly to increase his own ownership of GameStop stock by more than 4 million shares,” Radev said in the lawsuit.
GameStop shares have since fallen, though they remain higher than before Gill’s posts. They were trading around $23 early Monday afternoon.
Gill became one of the public faces of the meme craze, amassing more than a million followers on her YouTube channel “Roaring Kitty” and Reddit page “DeepF***ingValue.”
GameStop rose more than 1,700% over a period in January 2021, and the stock’s stratospheric rise appeared to pit struggling individual investors against sophisticated hedge funds that were heavily shorting the troubled mall retailer.
On Monday, shares of Chewy Inc. rose as much as 10% after Gill disclosed a 6.6% passive stake in the online retailer of pet food and supplies.
The filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission came days after the investor posted a photo with a puppy without any comment about X. The post briefly sent the pet food retailer to a one-year high on Thursday .
The case is Radev v. Gill, 24-cv-04608, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York.
(Updates with details of the complaint).
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