Tom Brady, the legendary NFL quarterback, is facing a lawsuit along with several other celebrities and athletes over their involvement with failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

The class-action lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the Southern District of Florida, alleges that the defendants’ public status made them responsible for promoting the company’s failed business model.

FTX, which was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, filed for bankruptcy last week following a disastrous few days.

The company’s CEO and founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has resigned after the firm, which has lost billions, sought bankruptcy protection.

The Bahamas-based company, along with Bankman-Fried, is under investigation by state and federal authorities for allegedly investing depositors’ funds in ventures without their approval.

The House Financial Services Committee has also announced plans to hold a hearing on FTX and its failure in December.

FTX became notorious after it entered into a number of sports-related deals, including with Mercedes for F1 racing, a sponsorship deal with Major League Baseball, and deals with Tom Brady, Steph Curry, and Shaquille O’Neal.

The lawsuit claims that the sports and TV celebrities brought credibility to FTX by association and should be held accountable.

“Part of the scheme employed by the FTX Entities involved utilising some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment – like these Defendants – to raise funds and drive American consumers to invest… pouring billions of dollars into the deceptive FTX platform to keep the whole scheme afloat,” the lawsuit said.

Class-action attorney Adam Moskowitz has pointed to previous precedent where the U.S. government has fined celebrities and sports stars like Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather for promoting failed cryptocurrency schemes.

He said: “The crypto industry needed celebrity endorsers to get any credibility.”

Last year, Tom Brady and his former wife Gisele Bundchen took an equity stake in FTX, which was bailed out by rival Binance amid crashing investments.

The couple even appeared in FTX advertisements and were reportedly paid in cryptocurrency.

David Boies, who represented Al Gore in the 2000 U.S. election, is also named as an attorney on the case, while the plaintiff in the case is Pierce Robertson, who is also involved in a case involving Voyager Digital, another failed cryptocurrency company.

Voyager Digital also filed for bankruptcy protection this summer, but FTX had pledged to buy Voyager’s assets for $1.4 billion.

The Miami Heat is also affected by the company’s bankruptcy. Their home arena will no longer bear FTX’s name despite the fact that the company signed a 19-year, $135 million deal last year. The building had been called the FTX Arena since June 2021.

The Heat were to receive $2 million annually as part of the deal, with most of the rest, roughly $90 million over the lifetime of the agreement, to be paid to the county, with the vast majority of it set to go towards fighting gun violence and poverty.

The Heat organization and Miami-Dade County released a statement following the news regarding FTX which read: “The reports about FTX and its affiliates are extremely disappointing.

Miami-Dade County and the Miami Heat are immediately taking action to terminate our business relationships with FTX, and we will be working together to find a new naming rights partner for the area.”