🐻 Major Youtuber exposed for NFT scam 👎

GM friends. Crypto is such an interesting industry to be in. We’ve got tons of incredibly smart people building real use cases that are just flying under the radar, while the greediest scammers are taking advantage of their huge following. SBF (FTX), Su Zhu (3AC), Do Kwon (LUNA), and Barry Silbert (DCG) all have one thing in common - no one ever wants to take responsibility.

In this issue:

• Major influencer exposed for NFT scam. Controversial Youtuber Logan Paul gets called out for his CryptoZoo NFT scam.

• Magic Eden falls victim to exploits. Solana's largest NFT marketplace has been involved in two major exploits this week that include fake NFTs and pornographic images.

• Quick bites: An update on SBF, Celsius and inflation.

Major influencer exposed for NFT scam

Logan Paul is no stranger to controversy. So it came as no surprise when we found out his NFT project, CryptoZoo was a total sham. Here's how it went down.

The start (and end) of CryptoZoo

The story starts back in 2020 amidst the crypto and NFT boom. Anyone and everyone was getting into NFTs and making big bucks off of the ballooning industry. Naturally, a flood of celebrities and influencers wanted to get in on it as well (as if they didn’t have enough money already).

In 2020, Logan Paul began to talk about his new blockchain gaming project.

The platform, CryptoZoo was set to launch in September 2021. By how Logan described it, CryptoZoo was supposed to be this super fun play-to-earn game that would feature one-of-a-kind, “handmade” NFTs.

Users would purchase these ‘egg’ NFTs using $ZOO tokens, which would hatch and be bred into hybrid NFT animals. What was so darn novel about it? I don’t know, but $2.5 million of unhatched NFT eggs were purchased even before the gaming platform launched.

That’s the power of social influence.

Fans and egg holders waited and waited for the platform to open, but it never did. To no surprise, the value of the $ZOO quickly dropped to nearly zero and Logan had yet to address the elephant in the room.

Eventually, Logan broke his silence, but instead of an apology, he blames it on a developer that he claims stole the code and fled.

The Coffeezilla Investigation

With no solid answers for his fans, Coffeezila, a rising Youtuber that investigates scams, decides to take matters into his own hands. In a 3-part Youtube series, Coffeezilla exposes Logan and his CryptoZoo team.

Here are the key details that he discovered:

• Logan apparently did not pay the developer, which is why he took the code private. He did not “steal” it as Logan claims.

• Logan and his crew quietly launched $ZOO two months before the public launch. This would allow them to buy it at a discount, without getting in trouble with the SEC.

• When $ZOO officially launched to the public, they created another token of the same name and airdropped all their $ZOO to themselves.

• There was backstabbing that happened within the team, but all-in-all, Logan and crew all still made massive gains.

So we’d say that this scam was a success.

The war on Twitter

Since Coffeezilla released his videos, Logan has finally come out to talk about what happened with CryptoZoo. Something tells me that if he wasn’t called out, Logan would have continued to remain silent and hoped people would forget about it.

In response to Coffeezilla, Logan drops a video taking absolutely no accountability for his actions. His only mistake was choosing bad team members, including an (alleged) felonious developer and a greedy influencer (Crypto King).

So what did we learn from this story? Don’t just blindly trust influencers. We saw it with all the celebrity supporters of FTX and now Logan Paul. In the end, the rich always get richer and that’s all they care about.

Magic Eden falls victim to exploits

Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace has been making the headlines this week, but not for good reasons.

Earlier this week, people began to notice some rather interesting images pop up on the platform, including pornographic images and stills from the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

They quickly responded and claimed that their third-party image caching service was compromised and that the Magic Eden platform was safe.

But not for long. A day later, Magic Eden actually fell victim to a major platform exploit. Scammers were somehow able to list and sell fake NFTs passing as part of popular collections.

There is also speculation that this exploit has actually been going on for months, but was flying under the radar until scammers started using it on big-name NFT projects.

The issue has now apparently been resolved and by goodwill, Magic Eden is refunding the 24 people who purchased a fake NFT.

Good for Magic Eden for the prompt response and transparency, but we suspect that this may not be the last time we see this happen. Stay safe.

Quick bites

SBF pleads not guilty to all criminal charges. So whose fault is it? His trial is set for October 2, 2023.

It’s not a good day for Celsius customers.

Prepare for another bumpy year.

Web3 resources to become alpha 💪

📜 A free, curated list of >700 alpha Twitter accounts to follow.🙅‍♂️ The number one mistake most web3 builders make, answered by 103 top influencers.🎥 A short video series on the language of crypto.

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