"a retrospective on Logan Paul's cryptozoo scam"-- Poppy Zaiger,7th grade
After NFTs and crypto exploded in popularity in 2021 and mostly fizzled out in 2022, a lot of people thought it was the end to possibly one of the most internet-breaking subjects. And although the market did crash and some of the highest cryptocurrencies sunk along with it, some still find it could still have value in the long term. But sadly, the crash didn’t get rid of everything—there are still scammers involved in the NFT and crypto currency space, and Youtubers have been involved in these scams, too, with Logan Paul being another story added onto the pile.
Logan Paul is a 27 year old who got famous off of making kids’ content on Youtube that slowly matured overtime into content for teenagers/young adults. Along with his gradual growth, his channel has been involved with multiple business deals such as having an energy drink company and currently having a contract with the WWE. He also has failed attempts such as when Paul promoted dink-doink, which was a show that you had to access by buying NFTs with animation that looked like it was slapped together with royalty free assets. That project was overturned when everyone found out that Paul wasn’t just promoting it and he was tied to the project. So, everyone was surprised when Paul came out with a new Cryptocurrency project called CryptoZoo.
After the disaster that was dink-doink, Paul automatically disclosed in his promotional video on his podcast that he is the creator of Cryptozoo. He explained that this crypto project is a game where you can get rich off of it, how this game was supposed to work, which was that his fans would buy Eggs with zooCoin (which was the name of the cryptocurrency) and when you hatch the egg you get different animals. These animals could be fused together to make rarer and more expensive animals, and you can burn the animal to release the ZooCoin inside of it. (This was how you could make money from the game.) He also made the bold claim that he spent six months and $1M on “real art” which was just stock photos fused together in photoshop. But when it came time for launch day, the functions Paul had previously boasted about didn’t even work. Everyone who bought Eggs couldn’t even hatch them, and Paul abandoned the project with all of the money that was sold with the ZooCoin. However, while a lot of people didn’t notice that Paul did this, this whole escapade caught one person's attention, and that person was an investigator that goes by the alias, Coffeezilla.
Stephen Findeisen, or “Coffeezilla,” is a Youtuber/Investigator who makes videos investigating scams.. few months ago, he posted a three part series about Cryptozoo that took an entire year to make, which outlined Cryptozoo as a scam. This shined a light on the abuse of the developers who were never paid for their work building the game itself, leaked texts with Paul and the people who were running this with him (Eddie Ibanez and CryptoKing) blatantly talking about a pump and dump scheme. (A pump and dump scheme is where you buy a ton of an inexpensive coin to make it look legit and sell it when the price rises.) The leaks also included proof of Paul hiring scammers and criminals to run CryptoZoo, and Paul’s manager threatening to take legal action on Coffeezilla for trying to reach out to Paul himself by calling his manager.
After all of the evidence was published, all of the interviews with people who got scammed, Coffeezilla sent a message in the video, saying that the only way he can apologize to the people that he scammed was to return the money. When this video went live it blew up, commentary channels were talking about it, it was on the news, and everybody was angry at Paul. And like in every good controversy, he responded.
Paul's Response was lopsided at best, and instead of targeting the points Coffeezilla made, he began attacking Coffeezilla’s reputation and trying to make him sound less credible, along with attempting to blame other people for his actions. At the start of the video, Paul claimed,“I watched your three part series called ‘Investigating Logan Paul's biggest scam’ and like many you have successfully used my name for views and money.” Later, he continued, “While your work used to be impartial, your addiction to clicks has clouded your judgment and you’ve made very very real errors with very real repercussions.”
Later in the video, after talking a little bit about how Coffeezilla is making arguments with real facts, he utters the first lie about Coffeezilla. “Coffeezilla tried to work with law enforcement in the past but his work was described as being not anchored to truth and often speculative.” Remember this quote because it will be referenced later in the story.
After a barrage of accusations and insults, Paul makes his first claim, he refers to one of the developers that Coffeezilla interviewed, who fled to Switzerland with Cryptozoo’s data and then held the data for ransom because he and his team were not paid for his work. Paul then spoke about the developer and how he was charged with multiple felonies and that it is wrong for Coffeezilla to interview him without mentioning his history. While this sounds like a good argument on the surface, it is funny that Paul even mentioned this developer's felonies, because it shows that there were no sufficient background checks on the people Paul was hiring. And he tries to cover this up by blaming it on an ex-developer named Eddie Ibanez, who not only is a serial scammer, but also talked to Paul and CryptoKing about scamming people in the leaked message boards. He says that Ibanez was the one who was hiring people and doing background checks and that he scammed Paul. This just goes back to the argument that there were no sufficient background checks on the people that they were hiring.
There are multiple cases of Ibanez scamming high profile individuals that were overlooked because they didn’t do research. Paul also made the claim that Coffeezilla had illegally recorded a conversation he had with Paul's Manager when he was threatening to take legal action on him. But in Texas (where Coffeezilla lives) there is a thing called one party consent, where you can record a conversation if you are actively engaging in it. The accusations transition from “debunking” claims to making himself look better in this situation. He kept making the claim that he never sold the coin he invested in the project, while everyone else took money, and although that was true it still doesn’t make it right because the other two creators of Cryptozoo who were in contact with Paul still took 7M dollars in ZooCoin from the market.
Wrapping up the video, Paul confidently said, “I’ll see you in court.” This video was taken down after Paul realized it wasn’t changing people's opinions like he had hoped, and after he deleted this response he issued another on his podcast named IMPAULSIVE, and it has the same problems of the deleted response, but with a longer runtime, more claims, and verifying he was going to press charges.
Although most of the claims were the same as the ones that were in his deleted video, there was a point where Paul expanded on the alleged court case. But his explanation was more of a justification on why he wanted to go to court. He said, “If you are perpetuating falsehood and it is affecting someone's business and reputation that person may take action” along with a confirmation saying, “This lawsuit is f****ng happening because this is wrong.” This was the part of the story that everyone expected. High profile individuals who get into controversies that could be considered illegal try to scare the people who speak out against them by dangling a defamation lawsuit above them. Besides the court case, he also tried to invite Coffeezilla on his podcast to debate saying, “Even though you broke laws, hardly sustained your evidence, fabricated dangerous falsehoods, I’d still love to see you on IMPAULSIVE.” Paul went on to say, , “I think he has an apparent bias against me which is reflected in his work.” This response got even more attention than the last one and other people in the youtube bubble had taken notice and started to make videos about Paul. But one video that was released by Penguinz0 was especially unique.
What made his video unique was that unlike all of the other videos on Paul, Penguinz0 had contact with Coffeezilla. Remember when Paul claimed Law enforcement called Coffeezilla’s work not anchored to the truth? Well Penguinz0 asked Coffeezilla, to which he responded, “My only interaction with Law enforcement was when I was asked to hand out evidence I found which later led to the arrest of this scammer named Jay Mazini.” The first two videos that he made on this topic were talking about how the other two responses Paul made were crazy, but the third video is the most interesting because Penguinz0 had a live interaction with Coffeezilla on his podcast.
The video at its core was casually talking about how everything has been going down after the Cryptozoo video. And it is here where we get some information about how Coffeezilla has been responding to the situation, he said that he never posted a response to Paul’s video on him because the commentary space said everything he wanted to say, so it would have just been pointless. He also poked fun at the weird way Paul responded to Coffeezilla calling his manager.
The entire video was them talking about the controversy in a way where they were not being defensive about the info and they were just generally talking about it from their perspective. This format received more positivity, unlike when Paul was angrily talking about how the situation on his podcast, like he was ranting to his lawyer. This video wasn’t a monumental shift in the story, but it was an example of how Paul should have just talked like a normal person instead of doubling down on insane responses. But when the backlash became too much, when Paul couldn’t keep up with doubling down, he had to apologize.
An apology titled “Thank you Coffeezilla ” released when the controversy was at its peak in realvance, and it is seen as the end of the controversy for the most part. The video felt weirdly disingenuous. He did pull out of the defamation lawsuit after backlash, he did make a proposition for a 1M dollar refund (although 7M dollars was taken), but for some reason he still tried to disconnect himself from Cryptozoo with the same argument (him not selling his investment). And there is something to notice about the cycle of events, the reason this is brought up is because this is almost the same as many other influencers who get tied up in controversies.
This is usually how the cycle goes:
Eventually this will happen again and again with different people, and Paul is definitely not the first person to scam their fans, but it just came as a shock to people because they thought he had changed after he… you know.. But at the end of the day, don’t trust cryptocurrency without researching, Please.
Logan Paul is a 27 year old who got famous off of making kids’ content on Youtube that slowly matured overtime into content for teenagers/young adults. Along with his gradual growth, his channel has been involved with multiple business deals such as having an energy drink company and currently having a contract with the WWE. He also has failed attempts such as when Paul promoted dink-doink, which was a show that you had to access by buying NFTs with animation that looked like it was slapped together with royalty free assets. That project was overturned when everyone found out that Paul wasn’t just promoting it and he was tied to the project. So, everyone was surprised when Paul came out with a new Cryptocurrency project called CryptoZoo.
After the disaster that was dink-doink, Paul automatically disclosed in his promotional video on his podcast that he is the creator of Cryptozoo. He explained that this crypto project is a game where you can get rich off of it, how this game was supposed to work, which was that his fans would buy Eggs with zooCoin (which was the name of the cryptocurrency) and when you hatch the egg you get different animals. These animals could be fused together to make rarer and more expensive animals, and you can burn the animal to release the ZooCoin inside of it. (This was how you could make money from the game.) He also made the bold claim that he spent six months and $1M on “real art” which was just stock photos fused together in photoshop. But when it came time for launch day, the functions Paul had previously boasted about didn’t even work. Everyone who bought Eggs couldn’t even hatch them, and Paul abandoned the project with all of the money that was sold with the ZooCoin. However, while a lot of people didn’t notice that Paul did this, this whole escapade caught one person's attention, and that person was an investigator that goes by the alias, Coffeezilla.
Stephen Findeisen, or “Coffeezilla,” is a Youtuber/Investigator who makes videos investigating scams.. few months ago, he posted a three part series about Cryptozoo that took an entire year to make, which outlined Cryptozoo as a scam. This shined a light on the abuse of the developers who were never paid for their work building the game itself, leaked texts with Paul and the people who were running this with him (Eddie Ibanez and CryptoKing) blatantly talking about a pump and dump scheme. (A pump and dump scheme is where you buy a ton of an inexpensive coin to make it look legit and sell it when the price rises.) The leaks also included proof of Paul hiring scammers and criminals to run CryptoZoo, and Paul’s manager threatening to take legal action on Coffeezilla for trying to reach out to Paul himself by calling his manager.
After all of the evidence was published, all of the interviews with people who got scammed, Coffeezilla sent a message in the video, saying that the only way he can apologize to the people that he scammed was to return the money. When this video went live it blew up, commentary channels were talking about it, it was on the news, and everybody was angry at Paul. And like in every good controversy, he responded.
Paul's Response was lopsided at best, and instead of targeting the points Coffeezilla made, he began attacking Coffeezilla’s reputation and trying to make him sound less credible, along with attempting to blame other people for his actions. At the start of the video, Paul claimed,“I watched your three part series called ‘Investigating Logan Paul's biggest scam’ and like many you have successfully used my name for views and money.” Later, he continued, “While your work used to be impartial, your addiction to clicks has clouded your judgment and you’ve made very very real errors with very real repercussions.”
Later in the video, after talking a little bit about how Coffeezilla is making arguments with real facts, he utters the first lie about Coffeezilla. “Coffeezilla tried to work with law enforcement in the past but his work was described as being not anchored to truth and often speculative.” Remember this quote because it will be referenced later in the story.
After a barrage of accusations and insults, Paul makes his first claim, he refers to one of the developers that Coffeezilla interviewed, who fled to Switzerland with Cryptozoo’s data and then held the data for ransom because he and his team were not paid for his work. Paul then spoke about the developer and how he was charged with multiple felonies and that it is wrong for Coffeezilla to interview him without mentioning his history. While this sounds like a good argument on the surface, it is funny that Paul even mentioned this developer's felonies, because it shows that there were no sufficient background checks on the people Paul was hiring. And he tries to cover this up by blaming it on an ex-developer named Eddie Ibanez, who not only is a serial scammer, but also talked to Paul and CryptoKing about scamming people in the leaked message boards. He says that Ibanez was the one who was hiring people and doing background checks and that he scammed Paul. This just goes back to the argument that there were no sufficient background checks on the people that they were hiring.
There are multiple cases of Ibanez scamming high profile individuals that were overlooked because they didn’t do research. Paul also made the claim that Coffeezilla had illegally recorded a conversation he had with Paul's Manager when he was threatening to take legal action on him. But in Texas (where Coffeezilla lives) there is a thing called one party consent, where you can record a conversation if you are actively engaging in it. The accusations transition from “debunking” claims to making himself look better in this situation. He kept making the claim that he never sold the coin he invested in the project, while everyone else took money, and although that was true it still doesn’t make it right because the other two creators of Cryptozoo who were in contact with Paul still took 7M dollars in ZooCoin from the market.
Wrapping up the video, Paul confidently said, “I’ll see you in court.” This video was taken down after Paul realized it wasn’t changing people's opinions like he had hoped, and after he deleted this response he issued another on his podcast named IMPAULSIVE, and it has the same problems of the deleted response, but with a longer runtime, more claims, and verifying he was going to press charges.
Although most of the claims were the same as the ones that were in his deleted video, there was a point where Paul expanded on the alleged court case. But his explanation was more of a justification on why he wanted to go to court. He said, “If you are perpetuating falsehood and it is affecting someone's business and reputation that person may take action” along with a confirmation saying, “This lawsuit is f****ng happening because this is wrong.” This was the part of the story that everyone expected. High profile individuals who get into controversies that could be considered illegal try to scare the people who speak out against them by dangling a defamation lawsuit above them. Besides the court case, he also tried to invite Coffeezilla on his podcast to debate saying, “Even though you broke laws, hardly sustained your evidence, fabricated dangerous falsehoods, I’d still love to see you on IMPAULSIVE.” Paul went on to say, , “I think he has an apparent bias against me which is reflected in his work.” This response got even more attention than the last one and other people in the youtube bubble had taken notice and started to make videos about Paul. But one video that was released by Penguinz0 was especially unique.
What made his video unique was that unlike all of the other videos on Paul, Penguinz0 had contact with Coffeezilla. Remember when Paul claimed Law enforcement called Coffeezilla’s work not anchored to the truth? Well Penguinz0 asked Coffeezilla, to which he responded, “My only interaction with Law enforcement was when I was asked to hand out evidence I found which later led to the arrest of this scammer named Jay Mazini.” The first two videos that he made on this topic were talking about how the other two responses Paul made were crazy, but the third video is the most interesting because Penguinz0 had a live interaction with Coffeezilla on his podcast.
The video at its core was casually talking about how everything has been going down after the Cryptozoo video. And it is here where we get some information about how Coffeezilla has been responding to the situation, he said that he never posted a response to Paul’s video on him because the commentary space said everything he wanted to say, so it would have just been pointless. He also poked fun at the weird way Paul responded to Coffeezilla calling his manager.
The entire video was them talking about the controversy in a way where they were not being defensive about the info and they were just generally talking about it from their perspective. This format received more positivity, unlike when Paul was angrily talking about how the situation on his podcast, like he was ranting to his lawyer. This video wasn’t a monumental shift in the story, but it was an example of how Paul should have just talked like a normal person instead of doubling down on insane responses. But when the backlash became too much, when Paul couldn’t keep up with doubling down, he had to apologize.
An apology titled “Thank you Coffeezilla ” released when the controversy was at its peak in realvance, and it is seen as the end of the controversy for the most part. The video felt weirdly disingenuous. He did pull out of the defamation lawsuit after backlash, he did make a proposition for a 1M dollar refund (although 7M dollars was taken), but for some reason he still tried to disconnect himself from Cryptozoo with the same argument (him not selling his investment). And there is something to notice about the cycle of events, the reason this is brought up is because this is almost the same as many other influencers who get tied up in controversies.
This is usually how the cycle goes:
- Influencer gets exposed for something terrible.
- Backlash.
- Influencer responds.
- More backlash.
- Influencer doubles down.
- Even more backlash.
- Influencer disingenuously apologizes and tries to sweep it under the rug.
Eventually this will happen again and again with different people, and Paul is definitely not the first person to scam their fans, but it just came as a shock to people because they thought he had changed after he… you know.. But at the end of the day, don’t trust cryptocurrency without researching, Please.
