Logan Paul’s NFT ‘Game’ is a huge crypto scam

YouTuber and internet personality Logan Paul has recently found himself with a massive target on his forehead. Paul, who has been on something of a redemption arc for the last few years after “suicide forest” fiasco in December 2017, is back in hot water after crypto researcher Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen published a three-part video series looking at CryptoZoo, a “blockchain game” Paul once heavily promoted. There are only two major problems here: The game doesn’t exist yet, and Paul’s most ardent fans and early investors have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process of 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 when Vine shut down. He regularly uploads vlog-style videos where he gives viewers a voyeuristic look into his everyday life and the various shenanigans he engages in. Although Paul was already a controversial figure during his early days of content creation, he didn’t draw the ire of the internet before December. 2017 when he filmed a video in Japan Aokigahara Forest where he and members of his crew filmed and interacted with a dead body in a way that many considered tasteless and inappropriate. (Aokigahara has a reputation for being a place of frequent suicides.)

This video and the subsequent reaction to it certainly boosted 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’s Raw while host a YouTube podcast which has over four million subscribers. Dude is doing really well for himself. However, he is the Internet’s protagonist again after what appears to be his involvement in one of the biggest crypto scams to be uncovered to date.

In a three-part video series totaling just over an hour, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen— a YouTuber who “exposes scams, con artists and fake gurus preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising” — watched CryptoZoo. What the hell is CryptoZoo? Well, like Paul explains it, it’s a “really fun game that makes you money.” according to official website, which says 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 that hatch to become animals. Once hatched, you breed these animals together to create hybrids, and the rarer the hybrid, the higher the daily yield of Zoo Coins. Cash these out and boom, you withdraw money. In short, it is structured to act as passive income.

Unfortunately, this “play to earn” NFT game is filled with handmade art – as Paul likes to emphasize on his podcast Impulsive—has never been playable yet, despite people sinking tons of money into it. Coffeezilla discovered that since CryptoZoo was introduced in 2021, Paul Stans has spent around $2.5 million on eggs alone, and the coin itself has skyrocketed to a market cap of around $2 billion. Some people Coffeezilla spoke to paid out tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on CryptoZoo because they believed Paul was a “changed man” and he created a “safe place” for everyone to invest in cryptocurrency. Turns out they were wrong, at least on the second part, because now these people are out thousands of dollars.

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 the passive income, the project’s core mechanic, “never did.” [work] from the beginning and wasn’t even written into the contract where it showed that you actually gave in with Zoo.” He went on to say that “there was no way to claim your return [and] it never has been.” Basically, people put money into a system that gave zero returns.

Even 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. “There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s basically worth nothing.” So you have die-hard Paul fans dying 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.

In Coffeezilla’s videos, we hear Paul explain certain issues with CryptoZoo’s development. Specifically, he says that a “developer fled to Switzerland” with the source code and held it hostage for $1 million, and that this is why the game has been broken. But this developer, who Coffeezilla spoke to during the investigation, claims he hadn’t been paid at all for his work on CryptoZoo, despite bringing in a team of 30 engineers and burning $50,000 a week to build the NFT project. Another CryptoZoo developer Coffeezilla spoke to confirmed the claim and said he too had not been paid at all. Not only did Paul’s fans find holes in their wallets after investing in CryptoZoo, but it seems that those who worked on the project were not even paid adequately or on time.

Kotaku contacted Findeisen and Paul for comment.

Paul, on the other hand, have said so report is “simply not true” and that “when appropriate, all bad actors will be exposed, explained and held fully accountable,” promising more details in his Jan. 3 podcast. On December 26, Paul became publicly invited Coffeezilla to appear on Impulsive podcast to hash it all out, although Coffeezilla responded by saying so he had already invited Paul to his show the day before. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be any of these exchanges.