Logan Pauls NFT game is a big crypto scam

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An image of Logan Paul in his “I’ll Never Fight Again” YouTube video from November 2022.

So, about those NFT eggs…

YouTuber and internet personality Logan Paul recently found himself with a massive target on his forehead. Paul, who has been on something of a redemption arc for the past few years following the suicide forest fiasco in December 2017, is back in hot water after crypto investigator Stephen Coffeezilla Findeisen released a series of videos in three parts on CryptoZoo, a Paul once heavily promoted blockchain game. 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 older brother of boxer and media personality Jake 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 content creation, Paul didn’t really arouse the ire of the internet until December 2017 when he filmed a video in the Japanese forest of Aokigahara 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.)

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This video and the resulting backlash completely decimated Paul’s career for much of 2018. However, since then Pauls has rehabilitated his image as a media personality and professional wrestler, signing to WWEs Raw while also hosting a podcast YouTube which has more than four million subscribers. . The guys are 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.

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With Coffeez

In a three-part video series totaling just over an hour, YouTuber Stephen Coffeezilla Findeisena, who uncovers scams, fraudsters and fake gurus who prey on desperate people with misleading ads, dipped into on CryptoZoo. What is CryptoZoo? Well, as Paul explains, it’s a really fun game that makes you money. According to the official website, which states that the game is currently undergoing core ecosystem infrastructure upgrades, CryptoZoo is a self-contained ecosystem that allows ZooKeepers to buy, sell, and trade exotic animals and hybrids. Basically, it is an NFT game in which players buy Zoo Coins, the CryptoZoos 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 in on them and boom, you draw money. In short, it is structured to work like passive income.

Sadly, this NFT play-to-earn game filled with handmade art that Paul likes to heavily feature on his Impaulsive podcast has never been playable yet, despite letting people invest money in it. tons of money. Coffeezilla discovered that since CryptoZoos 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 crypto. cash. Turns out they were wrong, at least on the second part, because now these people have lost thousands of dollars.

With Coffeez

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 projects, has never done [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 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 picture, the person said about the eggs. I can’t do anything with it. It’s basically worth nothing. So you have diehard Paul fans yearning to play a game that doesn’t work and losing money in the process. A game, mind you, that still doesn’t work to this day.

With Coffeez

In the Coffeezillas videos, we hear Paul explaining some issues with CryptoZoos development. Specifically, he says that a developer fled to Switzerland with the source code and held it hostage for $1 million, and that’s why the games were 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 the report simply isn’t true and that, if found, any bad actors will be exposed, explained, and held fully accountable, promising more details in his Jan. 3 podcast. On December 26, Paul publicly invited Coffeezilla to appear on the Impaulsive podcast to chop it all up, though Coffeezilla responded by saying he had already invited Paul to his show the day before. Whether or not anything will materialize from these exchanges remains to be seen.

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