YouTuber and web persona Logan Paul has discovered himself with an enormous goal on his brow not too long ago. Paul, who’s been on one thing of a redemption arc these previous few years following the “suicide forest” fiasco in December 2017, is again in scorching water after crypto investigator Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen printed a three-part video sequence wanting into CryptoZoo, a blockchain “game” Paul as soon as closely promoted. There are simply two obvious issues right here: The sport doesn’t exist but, and Paul’s most ardent followers and early buyers have misplaced lots of of hundreds of {dollars} within the technique of supporting it.
Logan Paul, the older brother of boxer and media persona Jake Paul, is a YouTuber who started creating content material on Vine within the early 2010s earlier than migrating to Google’s video platform as soon as Vine shuttered. He repeatedly uploads vlog-style movies during which he presents viewers a voyeuristic look into his day by day life and the varied shenanigans he engages in. While already a controversial determine throughout his early content material creation days, Paul didn’t actually draw the web’s ire till December 2017 when he filmed a video in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest during which he and members of his crew filmed and interacted with a lifeless physique in a fashion many thought-about tasteless and inappropriate. (Aokigahara has a status for being a web site of frequent suicides.)
This video and the following response to it completely tanked Paul’s profession for a lot of 2018. However, since then, Paul’s been rehabilitating his picture as a media persona {and professional} wrestler, signing to WWE’s Raw whereas internet hosting a YouTube podcast that boasts over 4 million subscribers. Dude’s doing very properly for himself. However, he’s the web’s fundamental character once more following what seems to be his involvement in one of many greatest crypto scams that has been uncovered up to now.
In a three-part video sequence totaling a little bit over an hour, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen—a YouTuber who “uncovers scams, fraudsters, and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising”—seemed into CryptoZoo. What the hell is CryptoZoo? Well, as Paul explains it, it’s a “really fun game that earns you money.” According to the official web site, which says the sport is at the moment “undergoing upgrades to the core infrastructure of the ecosystem,” CryptoZoo is an “autonomous ecosystem that allows ZooKeepers to buy, sell, and trade exotic animals and hybrids.” Basically, it’s an NFT sport during which gamers buy zoo cash, CryptoZoo’s in-game foreign money, to purchase egg NFTs which can be hatched to grow to be animals. Once hatched, you then breed these animals collectively to make hybrids and the rarer the hybrid, the upper the day by day yield of zoo cash. Cash these out and increase, you’re pulling in cash. In quick, it’s structured to work like passive revenue.
Unfortunately, this “play-to-earn” NFT sport crammed with hand-made artwork—as Paul likes to closely emphasize on his podcast Impaulsive—has by no means but been playable, regardless of letting folks sink tons of cash into it. Coffeezilla found that, since CryptoZoo’s introduction in 2021, Paul stans have spent some $2.5 million on eggs alone, with the coin itself skyrocketing to a market cap of roughly $2 billion. Some people Coffeezilla talked to shelled out tens, generally lots of of hundreds of {dollars} on CryptoZoo as a result of they believed Paul was a “changed man” and he was making a “safe place” for the everyperson to spend money on cryptocurrency. Turns out they have been flawed, not less than on the second half, as a result of now these individuals are out hundreds of {dollars}.
Rob, or Helicopter Bob, one of many victims Coffeezilla video-chatted with, mentioned he misplaced “just under $7,000 with CryptoZoo.” Helicopter Bob defined that the passive revenue, the venture’s core mechanic, “never did [work] from the beginning and wasn’t even written into the contract where it showed you were actually yielding with Zoo.” He went on to say that “there was no way to claim your yield [and] there never was.” Basically, folks have been placing cash right into a system that was offering zero returns.
Worse but, as an unnamed particular person advised Coffeezilla in a separate video name, those that invested in CryptoZoo couldn’t even hatch the eggs they purchased. “It’s just a picture,” the particular person mentioned concerning the eggs. “There’s nothing I can do with it. It’s basically worth nothing whatsoever.” So, you’ve bought diehard Paul followers pining to play a nonfunctioning sport and shedding cash within the course of. A sport, thoughts you, that also doesn’t work to today.
In Coffeezilla’s movies, we hear Paul clarify sure points with CryptoZoo’s improvement. Specifically, he says a “developer fled to Switzerland” with the supply code and held it hostage for $1 million, and that is why the sport’s been damaged. But this developer, who Coffeezilla spoke to in the midst of his investigation, claims that he hadn’t been paid in any respect for his work on CryptoZoo, regardless of bringing on a crew of 30 engineers and burning $50,000 every week to construct the NFT venture. Another CryptoZoo developer Coffeezilla spoke with corroborated the declare, saying he additionally hadn’t been paid in any respect. Not solely have been Paul’s followers discovering holes of their wallets after investing in CryptoZoo, however it seems that the folks engaged on the venture weren’t even being paid adequately or on time.
Kotaku reached out to Findeisen and Paul for remark.
Paul, for his half, has said that the report is “simply not true” and that, “when appropriate, all bad actors will be exposed, explained, & held fully accountable,” promising extra particulars in his January 3 podcast. On December 26, Paul publicly invited Coffeezilla to look on the Impaulsive podcast to hash all the things out, although Coffeezilla responded by saying that he’d already invited Paul onto his show the day earlier than. It stays to be seen whether or not or not something will come to fruition from these exchanges.
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