Investigating Logan Paul's biggest scam [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I've lately become slightly addicted. The production style is appealing, and the stories compelling. The fact that people like Logan Paul are able to pull off these scams with little accountability says a lot about our modern times. I definitely recommend Coffeezilla.
Not sure which parts of the mainstream media you're referring to but certainly not traditional (legacy?) print media like NYT/WaPo.
Maybe just maybe it's not interesting to big outlets because influencers like Paul have less influence overall than is apparent to the subcultures who follow them.
NYT on Paul [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/technology/crypto-influen...
What someone other than these media groups may do is make a “bold claim” that may be true but not demonstrably so. Something like that may shy a big company away from casting the first stone and instead to report on someone else’s claim as an allegation.
I think the objection is to the image of major media outlets living in fear of the Paul brothers. They regularly publish negative stories on people with much better lawyers, more influence, and scarier extralegal muscle.
When an organization has already taken on considerable risk on multiple fronts, they become much more conservative. I'd wager it's not fear of the Paul Brothers, it's a limited appetite for risk. Also, mitigating risk since it takes time to investigate a signal and turn it into a story; which the NYTimes seemed content to offload onto Coffee.
I also worked at The New Yorker. They have their own legal counsel and are not risk adverse in the least.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...
It's completely possible to live outside the crypto bubble- thank god.
I feel like many of these stories are pertinent. It may not matter to you but these are consequences from parents leaving their children in front of internet influencers throughout the 2010s and those influencers then turn out to be terrible people when they enter into their mid-late twenties.
Just a month ago "IShowSpeed" was shilling a crypto scam directly into children's touchscreens across the nation for the next generation to get caught up in this.
There was also a journalist who uncovered substantial evidence linking the Royal Family and Jeffrey Epstein years ago. She was pressured to drop the story, in part because of potential financial and reputational repercussions to the place she was working.
If Coffeezilla goes down, then crypto scams won't be investigated anymore, but the investigations also have little point without naming and shaming, so the risk is essential to the very purpose of what he is doing.
Whereas with the New York Times, if reporting about crypto scams lands them in enough legal trouble to make them unprofitable, the implications can be beyond investigations into crypto scams, it can undermine investigations into pretty much any aspect of society. They have more to lose and thus are naturally more risk adverse.
If the reporter is unlikely to have to hand money over via a judgement or settlement, that leaves the cost of hiring lawyers to defend the case. For an individual, that cost can still be ruinous, which is why so-called SLAPP suits really are a big problem. But an organization like the New York Times gets sued all the time. They have in-house counsel and paying them is part of the cost of doing business.
In theory, the cost of defending more libel suits could still be problematic in aggregate. But the proof is in the pudding. The New York Times is constantly publishing negative articles about all sorts of people. Just looking at the front page and limiting to investigative reporting (not coverage of specific news events, and not editorials) of targets that could theoretically sue (not e.g. Putin): today there's an article on the owner of 4chan; yesterday there was one on Trump; the day before, one on a large hospital chain (which "spent years cutting jobs, leaving it flat-footed when the pandemic hit"); the day before that, an article naming several extremists attending a Young Republican Club event. And of course there are many other articles that people could take offense to; Sarah Palin recently lost a libel case against the NYT for a 2017 editorial.
Coffeezilla is playing with fire but I think with his reach he'd be successful with a legal defense fund as well as lawyers working pro bono and recovering their fees via the plaintiffs.
[1] https://www.gibsondunn.com/recent-developments-in-california...
Different how? Isn't he the guy who went all the way to Japan to film bodies of dead people in the so-called "suicide forest" just to have a big laugh about it?
How likely is it that this kind of personality will take your money and laugh about it, and laugh about it more if it ends morbidly for you?
I know it's wrong, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who give money to someone like that. I mean, I'm sorry they're hurt and I'm sorry they're broke, but they really really should have known better.
Provided you differentiate feeling sorry for the victims and wanting the perpetrators brought to justice, I don't think there's any real social obligation to feel sorry for victims. Wanting justice can be justified by considering the corrosive effect crimes have on society as a whole, even though the direct victims don't deserve sympathy. For instance, when gangsters massacre other gangsters, I don't feel sorry for the victims (who lived by the sword, then died by it) but this lack of empathy for the victims doesn't temper my desire to see the perpetrators brought to justice.
The trap is when you don't care about the perpetrators facing justice because you think the victims deserved it. That's a bad path to go down.
The value of retribution exists independently of the desire for revenge.
> I don't think there's any real social obligation to feel sorry for victims.
I disagree. In general there is, it just isn't a legal one. Also this raises the question of where new laws come from (e.g. abolitionism)
Different in that they believe he appeals to the greater fool. We know that despite his controversies, he still attracts a significant audience. Anyone looking to him sees that as a money making opportunity.
Notice how all the early investors are more concerned about "when is Logan gonna market CryptoZoo" because that is how they make their initial investment back. Someone who was genuinely scammed would instead be talking about legal action.
You should appreciate that the sort of critical thinking one might take for granted in a community such as this is arguably the exception in society as opposed to the rule.
If so, at what point on the spectrum of intelligence from medical disability to childhood neglect, to growing up within an environment of anti-intellectualism to an environment where you're encouraged to blindly follow (such as some religious communities) to those that just offered blithe trust in something that is so big that they fell into herd mentality?
I personally have a strong aversion to gurus of any kind, to a point that it's more a flaw than a strength. I don't expect other people to be the same, and I understand (or at least I think I do) the appeal of role models.
But to fall for a man like Logan Paul, who is not just hollow, but obviously mean and a pathological liar... that's... inexplicable; and the only explication I can find is that these normal, non-stupid people were overcome by greed, and put their critical mind on hold (let alone their sense of morality).
To have absolutely zero empathy for people with considerably less fortunate backgrounds when they need our support the most demonstrates a dearth of compassion IMHO.
the last decade completely removed people foresight in negative outcomes. it's always the system or the other party
They wanted to get in and out early before the hype dies. They wanted to get rich quick. Of all the games out there, why shell out tens of thousands for an unreleased egg hatching game?
I took some material losses so it probably affected my reflection, but in any case it was a super deep lesson on human nature, and how, even in the 2020s we still operate on fuzzy animal logic (following, gurus, ..).
(trading highly speculative stuff like crypto really made me feel empty due, you're never selling something useful for the other, you just benefit from their lack of luck. Very strange superposition of emotions)
I agree with you that it's very hard to find any sort of value in someone like Logan Paul, but at the same time I'd imagine a lot of his fans are young people who are looking for role models. In this case, they might not have been mature enough to understand the type of person they were dealing with
Also, sympathy for the victim compels people to see to it that the perpetrator is punished
It's interesting, the journalist terms those who purchased eggs as "investors" and that may be fair, but it seems what they did was buy "eggs" to be used as part of a play to earn game that was unreleased.
I understand they expected the game to be successful and the eggs and the game currency to appreciate, but making this size of purchase before the game demonstrates that it actually works... it's hard to understand.
I don't blame the victims. They did however join a game with their earned money with intent to make more. Its not like they chose to fund cancer research or something beneficial. I don't feel too bad for the victims in this case, more just that I really despise the way society seem to be irreversibly headed.
I don't blame the victims as much as the scammers but I surely do put some blame on people too because Greed and/or desperation drives them to do things which are too good to be true. Most of us know better but still do it hoping it would pan out. There is no grift without grifters but there is no grift without gullible people as well.
If you are giving some stranger money so that you can double it in a year without really understanding why, you should be blamed. My 2 cents.
Back in those days brokers would fill up slow days with what they call good old cockney banter, shouted down the squawk box. Lots of BS and old fashioned attitudes, but they'd also spice it up with horse tips. This horse looks good for that race according to the stable boy, that kind of thing.
Every damn time the rumour would be wrong and everyone would lose a bunch of money.
So one day my boss decides to rebel. "Not losing another hundred quid to this BS, all you assholes can lose yours!".
Fate being what it is, the horse comes in. 30x. People are going nuts, one after another showing up at our desk to look at the idiot who didn't bet.
And this is how everyone who has sense still ends up doing things that aren't sensible.
Almost everything new is some form of scam or scheme. Particular on social media (IG, TikTok, etc.) almost ever ad or sponsored post is a scam. I can imagine that growing up right now you must assume this is normal and just the way it is.
flunkies
goons
who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, community managers;
duct tapers
who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff
box tickers
taskmasters
who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionalsIf you're going to collect something, doesn't it seem more authentic to collect something that was never meant to be collectable but became that way as the passage of time attrited that thing? Things which became collectable organically, rather than being manufactured with the intent of being collectable, stand a much better chance of retaining their value and seem intrinsically more interesting.
I guess in some cases the line is blurred. Like stamp collecting, and the existence of limited-run stamps originally intended to entice stamp collectors.
NFT’s are the exact same thing but instead of it being your school friends that are jealous and obsessed over your rare thing, now it’s a discord community of 10k+ that are going nuts over a golden jpeg. Every NFT project has to have a strong community that is incredibly excited about that artificially scarce collectible.
I’ve participated in NFT mintings and it really opened my eyes. They make 10,000 of these randomly generated images and sell them to a rabid community of speculators who are willing to throw hundred if not thousands of dollars at their chance to strike it rich.
There is really no valid argument that paying for a jpeg is any more ridiculous than paying for a piece of ultra thin cardboard with a baseball player on it that tends to gain in value based on going back in time in the players career. As if the rookie card being worth more than the second year is purely logical and not just a type of supply/demand herd mentality.
First is that collecting stuff can be fun. There's an element of the "thrill of the chase" tracking down individual items, and of discovering new things, and of completing a project of some kind. There's also sometimes an element of belonging to a community, The hobby of collecting becomes an activity in and or itself.
Second is that it's not entirely about scarcity. Baseball cards are desirable because people like to follow sports and athletes and stats. Funko Pops are desirable because people like pop culture and want figurines of pop culture figures. Fine art is desirable because it ostensibly looks nice (or fits some other definition of "art"). Most NFTs are also "art" or otherwise visually interesting, and moreover represent some kind of techno-futuristic optimism that appeals to people.
Of course, things get a little hairy once "real money" gets involved. There are orders of magnitude more money involved than, say, rare books or Magic: The Gathering cards, and the fact that everything is digital and highly liquid (in the financial sense) makes it all seem a lot more accessible. And of course that accessibility, coupled with the thing being poorly understood and widely hyped, makes it a uniquely tempting arena for scams and financial speculation.
The problem with that project and really all NFT projects is that they are way to expensive. If a CryptoKitty could be had for $5-10 then it would be a fun game, but when each NFT runs you into the hundreds and thousands of dollars, it stops being a game and starts being an investment vehicle.
It would be like if Magic the Gathering sold individual cards for $150 and to build an entire deck you would need about $10k. If that were the case, MTG would not be a popular game and everyone in it wouldn't be in it for the game, they would just hope their cards go up in value.
TL;DR - NFT's can be a great thing, the prices just need to come back down to earth.
Logan proceeds to never bring it up again and starts building hype for another project that totally won't be a scam. Rinse and repeat.
Afaik, Logan is just some internet moron. He has no credentials or life accomplishments, he’s just a pretty face with an attractive personality.
So if that’s who you’re going to trust to invest your money, maybe it’s good you don’t have as much money. Maybe that’s something that will actually improve our species.
Add in that these people who threw away all this money are happy to come in and laugh about it on camera (how did society get to this point where submitting your humiliation is normal?)… like what are we really upset about here? That losers are losers and they’re being taken advantage of?
That’s life. Maybe if people weren’t so insulated from their consequences they’d be raised to actually see these things from a mile away.
Yes, combined with what appears to be significant narcissism with malignant tendencies. He’s so shameless though that it somehow convinces people who want to love him that his malignancy isn’t that bad. In fact, maybe it’s funny! Maybe it’s cool. Just keep watching, I guess.
I don’t want him to profit off of other people, I don’t want people to be scammed by him, and I think the situation is awful. But it’s nothing new. People like him are uncommon, but not totally rare and their impact is broad. We should all practice far better awareness of this.
Having said that, I don’t agree that Darwinism and economics should necessarily be overlapped this way. The Venn diagram would seem to have some overlap, but people are worth much more than what they happen to accomplish financially. This is just a narrow aspect of what it is to be human, and largely mediated by nebulous things which arguably can’t determine one’s worth from a personal or evolutionary perspective.
Beyond that, the money lost by those who were conned is being gained by a con artist who will presumably use it to create more and better cons.
Eventually one of them might be good enough to rope in someone you care about or big enough to cause widespread damage.
Perhaps we should incentivize crime and fraud, since the victims are by definition less fit, and the attackers are by definition more fit?
I am not sure I care for this philosophy. It is timely though, I’ll give you that.
It’s an argument against using public resources to pursue him. The victims could sue him for money damages, and in the process arrange the facts such that a prosecutor can jump off them versus launching an independent probe.
That money doesn't just up and vanish though. It's now in the hands of an actively malicious person instead of someone who just makes poor decisions, and our society is structured such that that money gives the malicious person more legitimatcy and power, increasing the harm they can do. I can't see how society is better off that way.
All the "due dillegence" that these guys seemed to have done is: "well Logan is rich and famous so this must be legit". I would have a hard time investing $50 of my own money just based off that, I don't know how you can convince yourself that investing thousands into this one crypto project is a good idea.
They believe they are scammers too, not the victims?
Our economic systems were not designed nor ever intended to be a system where good or moral people prevail the most.
But in this age I’m not the least bit surprised that people will go to that great extent of mental gymnastics to for the satisfaction of “getting” someone they see as a villain.
It wasn't even his first crypto scam! He'd already run thru the same thing with "Dink Doink" (which iirc Coffee mentions in the video). It's incredible.
Anyone can be a victim of a scam, and nobody is at fault for falling for a scam except the scammers and the lax law enforcement around it.
This one is pretty blatant and very public.
BTW for anyone else interested - you can hit "show transcript" on any YT vid (with CC I'm guessing) - and follow along with the video and/or CTRL + F to find mentions of things.
On most screens "show transcript" will probably be hidden behind the triple dot menu to the right of the like/dislike buttons.
Seriously these are things that cause projects like crypto and nft's to get any ground, no one does the research, everyone waits for someone else to tell them what the point is, how it works, why its valuable or not.
I haven't seen any evidence yet that would lead me to believe the rate of scams are rising or that there's been a significant change in human behavior regarding this recently.
Similarly, a conman can reach hundreds of millions of people today vs a few thousand at best, 100 years ago. It is also cheaper.
Everything is amplified and today - especially bad behavior.
I think part of the problem lies here. We have this notion that there are those rich and powerful few, and there is the rest of us plebeians. Everyone wants to be the person that cracks the code and joins the ranks of the elite. All of a sudden that scammy crypto project looks like your ticket in and "all the haters just don't know".
One of the best things I've learned looking at this crap for the past few years is there really are no shortcuts, and any shortcut that's getting sold to you is snake oil.
People have been brainwashed that you need money, lots of it, to live a great life, socials magnify those sick ideas.
Sadly, I think this has been merely a general rule that each generation must learn for itself. It was pretty clear before 2008 as well.
Every ancient civilization has some sort of trickster god, after all.
These TV personalities are just a different flavour of that. You send them money to feel part of something and they line their pockets all the same.
This guy just has a pretty (and punchable) face he's using to grift his idiot fans.
Same mechanism, different medium.
Shame what’s happened to Bam Margera.
Considering how much he’s refused support, this was predicted for years. It’s all on him.
I don’t feel sorry for someone who throws away that many chances.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenner_Star_Wars_action_figure...
Legal Eagle did a video over dangerous toys recently and had this in it.
At the 3:15 mark.
If NBC had broadcast scams in He-Man or Scooby Doo rather than the weekly moral messages they'd have been off air faster than you could blink.
Regulation barely exists any more, except mainly to defend copyright owners.
[0] Or so I was led to believe.
This is just what celebrity looks like in the 20s. I may find him distasteful too, but I am not the least bit surprised a lot of kids think he's cool and don't think it's some failure in parenting.
Post YouTube there was a huge gold rush of rich kids looking to be at the front of queue using their parents money to buy impressive production or stage outrageous stunts. Tragically these rich kids apparently missed out on the character development arc where they fail and better themselves as people before they succeed. That's why today many of them are grifters and scammers.
People see a different world today. One where douchebags are rich, and people who work 9-5pm, and raise a family, are NPCs.
Everyone trying to get rich off an image has to sell that story in order to make money. If the world thought having a stable job and a loving family was the epitome of cool, none of these cash-grabbing losers would have an audience, everyone would be busy doing something useful.
Paul and his manager are amazing in that they can’t even form a complete sentence. They’re just reaching for seemingly relevant words. It reminds me of Walter from The Big Lebowski when talking about amphibious rodents being illegal within city premises.
To put it in perspective there’s a lot of startups with real useful products that have way less funding or revenue than people like this.
How is this possible?
Plenty of people out there with way more debt than assets. But if you can put your liabilities out far enough you can live like that forever.
You start with something modest, like $100,000 loan at 10-15%. You keep 75%. That’s your starting salary and covers you for a whole year. You use 25% to work on a scam that will generate $1,000-$1,500 a month to pay back your loan. You are scamming such small amounts from the most desperate people so you’ll never get caught or punished.
You get better at it and keep repeating. You work your way up to borrowing $1,000,000. You keep $800k, and spend $200k on scams that can generate $10-$20k a month. Really not that much if you never plan on actually paying back the loan.
Before you know it you’re at $10 million. You’re a multimillionaire now. You’ve “manifested” the life of your dreams. You’ve bought a house and cars and all sorts of stuff and your scam empire is now generating $100-200k a month. Your reach has grown and you are now attracting real ad revenue on top of scam money.
These kinds people are always working on “projects” and “products”. Whenever a project starts to look like it won’t generate what’s needed they literally just bail and refuse to pay anyone. And if anyone ever did go after them they wouldn’t get anything, because these people are broke.
You can live your entire life like this. You can live a great life with all the luxuries. What you can’t do is stop. It’s why these people never go away. People always say, “Why don’t these people just retire?” The answer is because they can’t. They may have a Bugatti, but the show must go on or it all goes away. Paying out $500k a month is not a big deal when you’ve got $20 million of runway but you know the end of the runway exists.
I remember an old video of Logan Paul, from way back in the Vine days where he says (paraphrasing), “I spend every moment of every day thinking about how to become more famous.” His life is a 24/7 hustle. Even the videos where he appears to be “chillin” are carefully staged and curated.
Ask yourself this: If you actually had a true NET worth of $50 million would you really be wasting your time on nonsense podcasts and NFTs?
Whether we realize it or not, no matter how DIY or independent we might be, we all rely on trust in others’ specializations to live anything resembling a modern lifestyle.
People are quick to judge those who have misplaced their trust as “dumb” but trust is quite a difficult thing to evaluate, particularly when information asymmetry is involved.
People who fall for scams usually do so in a very rational way, given the trust networks they have built for themselves.
My trust on anything happening on instagram or youtube has now reached 0
But to be honest (based on what some top Youtubers said about how underestimated is their public net worth) i think it's even more ridiculuous.
Just looking at these stories, it is absolutely possible to do this with cash, but once it goes into this unregulated world, its magical how much they can get away with.
To be clear, it is an extreme lapse in judgement. However, there are a lot of "little things" that make him accessible to a demographic of people. He talks in a way familiar to younger audiences. He participates in meme culture. He didn't get his fame from a "dad" job (the suicide forest bid and boxing I think? And just doing YouTube "stuff"). These are terrible reasons to trust someone but the critical thing is that they ARE reasons people choose to trust someone. Because in some cases, familiarity is the best yardstick for reliability some people have.
None of the victims in that video were "younger people".
He hinted at this in his podcast with lex Friedman. He also mentioned another forcing function would be when he has kids he needs to reconsider he's journalistic risk.
Not to say Coffeezilla is a grifter, but I think Coffeezilla is thriving in part due to his constraints. If he had a huge budget and resources, he wouldn't be an agile nobody who could convince anyone to get on the phone and tell on themselves. He'd be just another news outlet, with too much to lose to act in the way he's used to.
i think coffeezilla is doing well with what he has right now ajd i dont known if big budget and fake recognition mean more than the grassroots recognition he actually gets without those things.
Crypto, despite all the Crypto Andys extolling its still unrealized potential virtues, has shown itself to be a wonderful vehicle for scamming people. The only real application is bypassing laws. That's not inherently unethical (eg sending money to Venezuelan family members) but it's also great for scammers.
The more interesting question is why do people keep falling for this? The answer is ultimately despair. There is a recognition by many people that their circumstances are dire and they will likely never be able to improve their socioeconomic status. You have people who spend decades paying off student debt. Others who are every day risk of medical bankruptcy. And many younger people feel permanently locked out of having any kinf of housing security.
Despair is fertile ground for scammers as people feel like this is their only way out, the hopes for the next Bitcoin to make them wealthy. At what point do people realize that this is a systemic problem? It doesn't have to be this way, particularly in the wealthiest nation on Earth.
However in the case of pump and dumps, I would like to point out that the victims were trying to be successful pumpanddumpers themselves, but failed. These people didn't have a problem with putting their money on the line to try and sell to a great fool. For this reason I can't empathize much with these people (though of course it's still fraud and the fraudsters should still go to jail).
I find it interesting to note that at least one of the victims there was aware of this to some degree. He's the guy who put I think 7k into it and says "I just wanted to hatch the eggs and play in the ecosystem". Someone who just wants to play in the ecosystem will spend $50 and buy call of duty, not $7k for pictures of eggs. No, this guy is perfectly aware that he was trying to be a fraudster himself, and now they it turns out he's the victim he feels the need to point out that he just wanted to play, I guess out of embarrassment. Yeah, right.
To me, it’s unbelievable. Since Logan and his brother Jake has long history of scamming their fanbase over and over.
I don’t doubt that these people really did think of themselves as investors. What a bunch of fucking idiots. They “invested” in video games loot from Logan fucking Paul.
Unfortunately for them, in this case it was so broken that not even the sales mechanism was functional, so they couldn't even dump the eggs straight out of the gate