Logan Paul’s NFT ‘Game’ Is A Big Crypto Scam

YouTuber and internet personality Logan Paul recently found himself with a massive target on his forehead. Paul, who has been through something of a redemption arc in recent years after the “suicidal forest” fiasco in December 2017, is back in hot water after crypto investigator Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen released a three-part video series on CryptoZoo, a blockchain “game” Paul once heavily promoted. There are only two glaring problems here: the game doesn’t exist yet, and Paul’s most ardent fans and early investors lost hundreds of thousands of dollars backing it.

Logan Paul, the boxer’s older brother and media personality Jacques-Paul, is a YouTuber who started creating content on Vine in the early 2010s before migrating to Google’s video platform after Vine shut down. He regularly uploads vlog-style videos in which he gives viewers a voyeuristic look at his daily life and the various shenanigans he gets into. Already a controversial figure in his early days of creating content, Paul didn’t really draw the internet’s ire until December. 2017 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 way that many considered tasteless and inappropriate. (Aokigahara has a reputation as a site of frequent suicides.)

This video and the resulting reaction completely scarred Paul’s career for much of 2018. However, since then Paul has rehabilitated his image as a media personality and professional wrestler, signing to WWE Raw while host a youtube podcast which has more than four million subscribers. The guy is doing very well. However, he is once again the internet’s main character after what appears to be his involvement in one of the biggest crypto scams uncovered to date.

Cafezilla

In a three-part video series totaling just over an hour, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen—a YouTuber who “discovers scams, fraudsters and fake gurus who prey on desperate people with misleading advertising” — took a look at CryptoZoo. What is CryptoZoo? Well, like Paul explains it, it’s a “really fun game that makes you money”. According to official site, which states that the game is currently “in the process of upgrading the basic ecosystem infrastructure”, CryptoZoo is a “self-contained ecosystem that allows ZooKeepers to buy, sell and trade exotic animals and hybrids”. Basically, it is an NFT game where players buy Zoo Coins, CryptoZoo’s in-game currency, to purchase NFT Eggs which are hatched into animals. Once hatched, you then breed these animals together to create hybrids and the rarer the hybrid, the higher the daily yield from the zoo rooms. Cash them in and boom, you make money. In short, it is structured to work like passive income.

Unfortunately, this “play-to-earn” NFT game filled with handmade art – as Paul likes to point out heavily on his Impaulsive podcast – has never been playable yet, despite allowing people to invest tons of money in it. Coffeezilla discovered that since CryptoZoo was introduced in 2021, Paul Stans has spent around $2.5 million on eggs alone, with the coin itself skyrocketing to a market cap of around $2 billion. . Some people Coffeezilla spoke to have dumped tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on CryptoZoo because they thought Paul was a “changed man” and was creating a “safe place” for everyone to invest. in cryptocurrency. Turns out they were wrong, at least on the second part, because now these people have lost thousands of dollars.

Cafezilla

Rob, or Helicopter Bob, one of the victims Coffeezilla video-chatted with, said he lost “just under $7,000 with CryptoZoo.” Helicopter Bob explained that passive income, the core mechanic of the project, “never did [work] from the beginning and wasn’t even written in the contract where it showed that you were actually giving in with Zoo. He went on to say that “there was no way to claim your performance [and] there never was. Basically, people were putting money into a system that was not delivering any returns.

Worse still, as an anonymous person told Coffeezilla in a separate video call, those who invested in CryptoZoo couldn’t even hatch the eggs they purchased. “It’s just a photo,” the person said of the eggs. “There’s nothing I can do about it. It is worth nothing at all. So you have diehard Paul fans who yearn to play a game that doesn’t work and lose money in the process. A game, mind you, that still doesn’t work to this day.

Cafezilla

In the Coffeezilla videos, we hear Paul explaining some issues with the development of CryptoZoo. Specifically, it says that a “developer fled to Switzerland” with the source code and held it hostage for $1 million, and that’s why the game was broken. But this developer, whom Coffeezilla spoke to during its investigation, claims that he was not paid at all for his work on CryptoZoo, despite hiring a team of 30 engineers and spending $50,000. $ per week to build the NFT project. Another CryptoZoo developer, Coffeezilla, corroborated this claim, saying that he also didn’t get paid at all. Not only did Paul’s fans find holes in their wallets after investing in CryptoZoo, but it seems the people working on the project weren’t even being paid adequately or on time.

Kotaku has reached out to Findeisen and Paul for comment.

Paul, for his part, said that the report is “simply untrue” and that, “if at all, all bad actors will be exposed, explained, and held fully accountable,” promising more details in his Jan. 3 podcast. On December 26, Paul Coffeezilla publicly invited to appear on the Impaulsive podcast to chop it all up, although Coffeezilla responded by saying that he had already invited Paul on his show the day before. Whether or not anything will materialize from these exchanges remains to be seen.