According to the complaint, Pasternak launched the $PASTERNAK token on Solana on January 24, 2025, publicly stating he held "0 ownership" in the project. Plaintiffs allege this statement was false and designed to manufacture retail confidence. The token was subsequently rebranded to $LAUNCHCOIN and then forcibly migrated to $BELIEVE on October 15, 2025 — a migration that, according to the complaint, diluted existing holders by approximately 33% through 333 million newly-issued tokens distributed to insider-linked wallets.

Anyone who missed the two-week conversion window had their holdings permanently destroyed. From May through October 2025, while the rebranded $LAUNCHCOIN token declined over 99%, Pasternak made at least 12 separate public commitments to a "flywheel" buyback mechanism that was supposedly going to channel platform fees back into the open market. According to the lawsuit, no buyback ever occurred.

Across the lifecycle of the Believe platform, approximately $6 billion in trading volume was processed. Of this, Pasternak allegedly extracted an estimated $54 million in fees. The complaint alleges he "ran the same play three times, under three different token names."

The Bureau's parallel investigation, conducted under the parody-jurisdiction of the Memecoin Forensics Division, contributed extensive on-chain analysis to the public record. A profile of Pasternak is maintained on the Bureau's Most Wanted listing as case #MBI-2025-007.

Pasternak's last original X post was in October 2025. The official Believe account on X went dark in mid-January 2026. He briefly resurfaced to tease "Believe v2" without addressing the losses already accumulated by holders. At the time of his most recent legal proceedings, he was reportedly residing at a $2,000-per-night Manhattan hotel.