Investors Scammed by YouTuber Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo
YouTube sensation Logan Paul has apologized to fans who lost money after investing in his cryptocurrency game, CryptoZoo. The 27-year-old, who boasts over 23 million subscribers on the platform, had encouraged people to buy into the game, promising a “really fun game that makes you money.” Unfortunately, over a year after its launch, no game has materialized, and it seems that Paul has abandoned the project altogether.
CryptoZoo was launched in 2021 after first being discussed on Paul’s podcast Impaulsive. In the podcast, Paul mentioned that he had spent “probably about one million” dollars on developing CryptoZoo and had a “massive team behind the project.” The CryptoZoo website currently states that it is “undergoing upgrades,” but it remains unclear if the game will ever see the light of day.
The concept of CryptoZoo was that it would be an autonomous ecosystem that would allow “ZooKeepers” to buy, sell, and trade exotic animals and hybrids. The game would incorporate cryptocurrency and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) into a simple and fun game with familiar mechanics. The project sold images of cartoon eggs as NFTs, with the promise that collectors would be able to hatch them into randomly chosen animal images.
Collectors would then be able to “breed” their animal images to create new species and win coins in a linked cryptocurrency called $ZOO. In a since-removed project roadmap, many games were promised in 2022 that would incorporate the animal NFT images, but no playable features were delivered. It is not known how many investors CryptoZoo has, but the project’s Discord server has about 500 members.
After selling millions of dollars worth of NFTs and crypto coins, Paul stopped talking about CryptoZoo and seemingly abandoned the project. Last month, cryptocurrency scam investigator Stephen Findeisen, known as Coffeezilla on YouTube, began a three-part video series about CryptoZoo, calling it a “scam.” In his videos, that have had nearly 18 million views, Coffeezilla accused Paul of scamming investors and abandoning them after selling them “worthless” digital items.
In response, Paul posted an angry rebuttal video, admitting that he made a mistake hiring “conmen” and “felons” to run his project, but denied the failures were his fault. Paul’s team has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment. He accused Mr Findeisen of getting facts wrong and threatened to sue him. But on Saturday, Paul deleted his video and apologized to the investigator. He also wrote on the CryptoZoo Discord page that he would be “taking accountability, apologizing, and coming forward with a plan in the near future.” No further details have been given about how Paul plans to either reimburse investors or relaunch CryptoZoo.