After the token plummeted, Hern received an email from the developers, who spun a story about how they were just fans of his, and that it was just an unfortunate mistake that people has mistaken their usage of his name and "Guardian" to mean he was involved.
Someone impersonates Guardian tech editor Alex Hern to shill a cryptocurrency
Alex Hern, a technology editor at the Guardian, was surprised to receive an onslaught of messages asking about "Tsuka", a new crypto token. It turned out someone had been using Hern's identity to promote the token. After Hern set the record straight with a message in the token's Telegram channel and a note in his Twitter bio, the token crashed — at least as much as a $0.00015 token with a notional market cap of around $100,000 can crash. But it was enough to hurt some of the people who had been misled by the scam — one person messaged Hern to say he'd lost $400 on the crash, which was around a month's wages in his country, and which he described as his "life savings".