YouTuber and internet personality Logan Paul recently found himself with a massive target on his forehead. Paul, who has been in a redemption arc of sorts for the last few years after the “Suicide Forest” The December 2017 fiasco is back in hot water after crypto investigator Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen released a three-part video series delving into it CryptoZoo, a blockchain “game” that Paul once heavily promoted. There are only two glaring issues here: the game doesn’t exist yet, and Paul’s most ardent fans and early investors lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in support.
Logan Paul, the boxer and media personality’s older brother Jake-Paul, is a YouTuber who started creating content on Vine in the early 2010s before migrating to Google’s video platform after Vine closed. He regularly uploads vlog-style videos in which he offers viewers a voyeuristic glimpse into his daily life and the various shenanigans he is involved in. Although Paul was already a controversial figure in his early content creation days, it wasn’t until December 2017 that he really drew the ire of the internet when he shot a video in Japan Aokigahara Forest in which he and members of his crew filmed and interacted with a corpse in a manner that many considered distasteful and inappropriate. (Aokigahara has a reputation for being a site of frequent suicides.)
That video and subsequent reaction to it absolutely put the brakes on Paul’s career for much of 2018. Since then, however, Paul has rehabilitated his image as a media personality and professional wrestler. Signing to WWE’s Raw during Hosting a YouTube Podcast with over four million subscribers. Dude is doing very well. However, he is once again the main character of the internet after apparently being involved in one of the biggest crypto scams yet uncovered.
In a three-part video series totaling just over an hour Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen— a YouTuber who “exposes scams, scammers, and fake gurus preying on desperate people with deceptive ads” — took a look at CryptoZoo. What the heck is CryptoZoo? Well, than Paul explains it, it’s a “really fun money making game”. According to the official site, which states that the game is currently “undergoing upgrades to the core ecosystem infrastructure,” CryptoZoo is an “autonomous ecosystem that allows ZooKeepers to buy, sell, and trade exotic animals and hybrids.” Basically, it’s an NFT game where players buy Zoo Coins, CryptoZoo’s in-game currency, to buy egg NFTs, which are hatched to become animals. After hatching, you then breed these animals together to create hybrids, and the rarer the hybrid, the higher the daily yield of Zoo Coins. Trigger these and boom, you’re pulling in money. In short, it’s structured to work like passive income.
Unfortunately, as Paul likes to point out in his podcast, this play-to-earn NFT game is full of handcrafted art Impulsive– has never been playable, despite people pouring tons of money into it. Coffeezilla discovered that Paul Stans has spent around $2.5 million on eggs alone since CryptoZoo launched in 2021, with the coin itself exploding to a market cap of around $2 billion. Some people Coffeezilla spoke to have spent tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on CryptoZoo because they believed Paul was a “changed man” and that he was creating a “safe place” for anyone to invest in cryptocurrency. It turns out they were wrong, at least in the second part, because now these people have lost thousands of dollars.
One of the victims Coffeezilla video chatted with, Rob or Helicopter Bob, said he lost “close to $7,000 on CryptoZoo.” Helicopter Bob explained that passive income, the core mechanism of the project, “never did that [work] from the start and wasn’t even written into the contract showing that you actually backed down with Zoo. He continued: “There was no way to claim your earnings [and] that never happened.” Basically, people were putting money into a system that didn’t produce a return.
Worse, as an unnamed person told Coffeezilla in a separate video call, those who invested in CryptoZoo couldn’t even hatch the eggs they bought. “It’s just a picture,” the person said of the eggs. “I can not do anything with it. It’s basically worth nothing.” So you have die-hard Paul fans who long to play a game that doesn’t work and lose money in the process. Mind you, a game that still doesn’t work today.
In Coffeezilla’s videos, we hear Paul explain certain issues with CryptoZoo’s development. Specifically, he says a “developer fled to Switzerland with the source code” and took him hostage for $1 million, and that’s why the game broke. But this developer, whom Coffeezilla spoke to during his investigation, claims that despite hiring a team of 30 engineers and burning $50,000 a week building the NFT project, he was not paid at all for his work on CryptoZoo. Another CryptoZoo developer Coffeezilla spoke to confirmed the claim and said he wasn’t paid at all either. Not only did Paul’s fans find holes in their wallets after investing in CryptoZoo, but it seems that the people working on the project weren’t even paid properly or on time.
my city asked Findeisen and Paul for a comment.
Paul for his part said that the report is “simply not true” and that “all bad actors will be debunked, explained and held fully accountable when appropriate,” he promises more details in his January 3 podcast. December 26 Paul Publicly invited Coffeezilla on the appear Impulsive Podcast to find out everything, although that’s how Coffeezilla reacted he had already invited Paul to his show the day before. It remains to be seen whether anything will come of this exchange or not.
