The two-time FIFA World Player of the Year and Ballon d’Or winner, retired Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho is under fire for promoting the memecoin World Cup Inu ($WCI) ahead of the upcoming FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.

Ronaldinho was seen hyping up the World Cup Inu coin listed as the “First World Cup Token on ETH.” It’s a combination of two hot trends right now: the upcoming World Cup and Dogecoin (Inu).

Famous crypto community member “FatManTerra” called out the move by noting that the World Cup Inu deployer is charging a 4% swap tax on DEX trades and has already cashed out $300K+ from WCI token.

He tweeted there are also contract functions to unilaterally increase the swap tax and to pause trading, cautioning the community that it’s best to stay away from the project.

The official Twitter account of World Cup Inu responded to these allegations by saying that there is a 5% tax on buys and sells.

“Don’t make posts when knowledge on the subject is limited. The deployer is a marketing wallet, every txn is spent on marketing/developments,” WCI tweeted.

Even crypto sleuth ZachXBT took a break from his vacation to call out Ronaldinho for hyping the World Cup Inu token by tweeting “Potentially first football player to get charged for promoting blatant crypto pump and dumps? Hope you enjoy bankruptcy and hurting your fans.”

The World Cup Inu team continues to blatantly ignore the criticisms from the community overall. Currently they are promoting a jersey giveaway where the biggest buy in 48 hours will win this jersey signed by Ronaldinho himself.

This is not Ronaldinho’s first venture in the web3 space. In February, Ronaldinho forayed into crypto by partnering with Graph Blockchain becoming their brand ambassador for its metaverse and NFT platform launch. In April, Ronaldinho launched creator token $RON with social token platform P00LS.

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