Coffee's recent interview on the Lex Fridman podcast gives more background to these investigations, and specifically why you're not seeing them in mainstream media. Basically, Coffee is taking a lot of risk, as the scammers apply a lot of pressure, including legal threats and not so legal threats, to suppress knowledge of their wrongdoing. Mainstream media tends to give in to these threats, but Coffee is in a somewhat unique position of being able to take them on.
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.
> Mainstream media tends to give in to these threats,
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.
Exactly. Big pint media companies like those you mentioned and New Yorker put out plenty of articles in spite of legal threats. They have legal teams that can tell them if the threats are founded or not and generally have a good track record of defending their positions.
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.
The difference is breaking the story vs reporting on it after it has been broken. Had Coffee not put out his video series, NYT would have likely not been compelled to write a piece about it
I haven't followed this but I will take anyone's word for it that Coffee did break the story and cause the NYT to take notice, and that was great work.
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.
Perhaps the risk/benefit ratio explains it better. The NYTimes could break a story that could undermine future access to an influential group of elites and that could be not factual and invite pesky questions, in exchange for a potentially, considerable boost in reputation. Or they could play it safe, wait for someone else to take the plunge, and then follow after, with a negligible increase in their reputation.
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 doubt that. I worked at the NYT for 8 years (not on editorial side) and that’s not how they think. Also I think the legal department would very much disagree with you.
I also worked at The New Yorker. They have their own legal counsel and are not risk adverse in the least.
Maybe they once did, but no longer. If they did, they’d cover the laptop story or the sketchiness with Burisma. Those are conveniently ignored for articles about diversity in knitting communities [0]. Journalism is dead outside of a few remaining gumshoes.
Safemoon was a four billion dollar scam (which is another that CoffeeZilla has reported on).
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.
The billions run up quickly.. you have 1,000,000 people pay one dollar for a coin. And one person pay 10,000, suddenly it’s a $10bil scandal. Just because one person paid the final value doesn’t mean there is a bil in value. Technically 100 people can exit at 10k, then the pool is empty. That’s the story of crypto over and over.
FTX is a good example: one of the investigative journalists he interviewed alleged that Bloomberg (I think, could be misremembering) refused to publish his articles critical of FTX because FTX was buying a lot of ads on their platform.
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.
You're remembering right, and the accusation is in this video 3 weeks ago where he has Marc Cohodes accusing Bloomberg of spiking the story because it would be bad for (crypto) advertisers. A good news organization doing actual investigative journalism would have been able to get this story, if nothing else by following up tips such as these. A question which remains unanswered is: why didn't they?
His argument is that major outlets have more to lose than he does.
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.
The thing is that these legal threats are usually empty, as far as the chances go of actually winning. There might be more cause for the concern in the UK or other countries, but in the US it's very hard for a public figure to win a libel suit, even if the reporting is sloppy, or even if the reporting contains substantial false information, as long as it wasn't done on purpose. That was established in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.
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.
IANAL but I looked this up when the ElonJet story broke and even in states with very strong anti-SLAPP statutes, the defense can get really expensive really fast. In the California case Hill v. Heslep et al. the final legal cost to the defendants paid out after they won the anti-SLAPP motion was $104,747.75 [1]. Assuming half this cost was borne by the publisher and the rest was evenly split between the other three defendants, that's still tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of stress before the case is thrown out.
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.
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.
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.
This part is baffling. The story has always been that Logan has a young, impressionable audience. These are grown men with a bunch of disposable income, and they’re listening to the Logan Paul podcast and buying his crypto nonsense? Does not compute.
This is just virtual musical chairs for a lot (most) of them. Also bunch of disposable income does not mean a person is not an idiot. This has been proven many many times.
herd mentality is an incredibly strong force as well as social proof. Logan Paul is so big that those without critical thinking may think its a safe bet.
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.
would you feel sorry for someone with mental disabilities that was scammed like this?
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?
It's a good and fair question. But if you watch the entirety of the video, which features interviews of the victims, you will see that those people are 1/ certainly not mentally impaired 2/ not "stupid" either (as in, people who couldn't understand a question or articulate a clear answer).
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).
I mention the spectrum. Just because they're not visibly drooling or don't have any obvious disabilities doesn't mean they're a entirely competent. Childhood neglect for example is an intersection rarely seen in a place like this because it barely intersects with the lives of most professionals who tend to come from more supportive backgrounds. However it still exists and I would argue is considerably more prevalent than you're possibly giving it credit for.
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.
There's gotta be a line between victim blaming and outright victim stupidity. I think these people who fell for these scams may be on the latter half of that line.
I'm not sure how anyone can say with a straight face that they trusted and believed in Logan. I would sooner buy a bored ape than crypto from him. These scams are easy to see through I thought. But people ended up spending millions of dollars on it before it was even released?
Also, it's not like these "investors" preordered a game for $100 and it never released.
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?
Only my personal experience but at certain times I was in need to follow people in the light, whether shady or not, my brain was in a fog. Add the crypto get rich quick factor and people will just spend all their neurons into trying to guess where they will make the more money.
Spending two years in crypto made me realize I too was capable of being gullible. Education evaporates in these situations (I was jobless and in a hurry to escape from the pit, I'm not anymore which probably helped) you regress to very primitive social reflexes. Crypto was probably an amplified context but trading (and other similar money related activities) are similar.
Crypto is a terrible environment. I know a couple of people that scored really big at the obvious expense of others, and one guy that is now circling the drain after being super high for a while. It's great to see you managed to escape the lure.
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, ..).
What causes his turmoil ? The newfound material wealth was too rapid and he lost a notion of normality? Or is it having luck while others lost being a burden on his mind ?
(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 mean, I'm sorry they're hurt and I'm sorry they're broke, but they really really should have known better.
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.
The world has gotten too good too fast in many places. Hugh sectors of the "economy" are effectively scams and fake jobs to the point it is near the norm rather than exception. Kids grown into adults now have seen it their whole lives, they have been ripped off themselves repeatedly. Millions have donated to charities that were supposedly reputable for years to later find out they were stealing or using the money for their own benifit. Why would they not think of getting in on a scam for their own benefit for once.
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.
I feel this so acutely and I often wonder how other people don’t see this and it makes me want to scream.
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.
BS Jobs is the official term. From a tech perspective though there are plenty of people even on HN that will freely admit they probably do less than 10hrs of work in a week. There is also adversarial hiring in tech where you hire highly educated people and make/find work so your competitors don't hire them.
flunkies
who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters
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
who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;
taskmasters
who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
I can't begin to understand what the perspective of someone who holds value in their head for NFTs is. Are they grifters themselves in an Amway kind of deal? Is there some actual use that I'm just totally missing?
I guess the charitable take is they’re just collectibles. As someone who has a moderate interest in collecting physical things (such as vinyl records) it’s hard to understand why anyone would enjoy “collecting” an entry in a data structure.
Collection of products manufactured with the intent of being collectables is another thing I can't wrap my mind around. Intentionally rare baseball/pokemon/magic trading cards, beanie babies, funko pops... I just don't get it.
If 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.
Collective mania is a thing. Why do you want that rare Pokémon card? Because all of your other friends play Pokémon and they want it too so it has value to you even though it’s literally just a piece of paper with a cool graphic and happens to be artificially scarce.
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.
I am just too old for NFTs but I can completely understand how that is cool having grown up collecting baseball cards.
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.
I don't get it either, but I think I understand why people do.
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.
I think for many people, they do not understand exactly how people make money on investments, and how they are supposed to feed back into the economy. Everybody wants 100x returns like the early internet produced from communication changes. But it is actually rare event.
The one application of NFT's that I really like is CryptoKitties. Basically you can buy some NFT's and then "breed" them to mint new NFT's.
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 Paul starts heavily promlting an NFT project. He claims that he's super passionate about it and has spent 1M of his own money into it, presumably to signal that it isn't a rug-pull scam like all his previous rug-pull scams. People put millions into it before it even launches, only for it to launch in a completely broken state and instantly lose value. It's clear that all the claims Logan was making to hype the project weren't true. Coffeezilla, attempting to figure out what happened, reaches out to the devs who claim they weren't paid, then reaches out to Logan's manager who refuses to comment and makes thinly veiled threats of legal action of Coffee reports on any of this.
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.
> Afaik, Logan is just some internet moron. He has no credentials or life accomplishments, he’s just a pretty face with an attractive personality.
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.
That’s very kind of you to say. Thank you! I think of most of the words I dump onto the internet as incoherent rambling so it’s relieving and even gratifying if someone finds a signal in the noise.
> doesn’t that mean “maybe it’s better” if fraudsters accumulate wealth with impunity?
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.
So who becomes the arbiter of which victims are "worthwhile" to try to seek justice for and which get thrown to the wolves? Do you think going down this path is likely to end up in a good place?
Why would it be beneficial for society to filter out people who make poor business decisions? Many of the greatest generals, politicians, scientists, and artists in history were terrible at business and fell for scams many times.
> 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.
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.
I watched the video the other day when it came out and he interviewed several people that invested between 10k and 500k into the project. Seems like all those folks got taken up by the hype but the part I just can't wrap my head around is even then, how do you just dump that much money into something without any due diligence.
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.
I agree with all of this, my only guess as to how some of these people could dump that much money into something without any due diligence, is perhaps their source of the investment was other crypto gains so it didn’t seem like real money in the first place. (Ie was not money they actually work for/earned nor ever had in their “fiat bank account”, so it all seemed fake/like Monopoly money.
That’s not a problem and it’s bizarre seeing all these comments repeating the same message.
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.
This was exactly my thought. I have no idea how adults are following Logan Paul and dropping tens of thousands of dollars on his obvious crypto grift. I cannot wrap my head around it, I thought his audience was young, impressionable zoomers.
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.
Highly likely that a substantial portion of the victims, maybe even the majority, knew it was a rug-pull scam but thought they could get in, make a profit and get out before everybody else got screwed.
There's an old line that you can't cheat an honest man. It's not always true, of course. But one of the most reliable source of marks is people who are looking to get something for nothing.
Yeah i wonder about this too. I think the popular perception is that his followers are particularly young and impressionable, so if the actual investors in the scam tended to be older it lends weight to that idea. There is an old saying that "you can't con an honest man."
I agree, but there are different levels of scam, and this isn’t a particularly complex one. Very little was required from the conned to figure out it’s a scam; e.g., the involvement of the “NFT” concept.
People dropped millions on tokens based on a celebrity's promise of those tokens being useful in a future fun game that lets you earn money.
I guess the game never materialized.
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.
IMO it's a too long video that should instead focus on explaining why "play to earn" doesn't work and can't work sustainably, regardless of whether it's from Logan Paul or someone else. Then it'll remain just as fresh for debunking the next scam.
npm install <topic I want to be an expert at without any of the work to become knowledgeable>
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.
The thing that kind of amazed me is the interviews with seemingly normal people who were victims of this scam. A common thing they said was "well I assumed this was legit because it's Logan Paul behind it. I trust him." It's hard for me to fully understand the naivete inherent in falling for someone like Logan's act and thinking he's somehow trustworthy.
I imagine it comes from people's optimistic belief that trust can be rebuilt and bad people can be reformed. When a public figure was disgraced so openly, by the entire planet, any kind of comeback indirectly reflects a positive change. If they were bad people, it's hard to understand why they are still popular. I am not arguing that any of that logic is correct, just sympathizing why Logan Paul was given a second chance by a lot of these people.
I think it's because the concept of having a stable career that allows people to have a good life, family, house and retirement seems more and more out of reach for a lot of people. So get-rich-quick schemes appear the only way out. And after the 2008 bailouts it became pretty clear that there are different rules for different people and it's ok to lie to people if you are just brazen enough.
This feels a bit revisionist to me. There's a long and storied history of conmen, charlatans, and scam artists going back to at least thousands of years and probably to the dawn of human culture.
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.
Are people more racist, sexist, dumb etc today, compared to 50-100 years ago? I’d guess no, but it feels that way because of the global and instant nature of the internet. YouTube is filled with videos of people doing dumb things.
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.
> And after the 2008 bailouts it became pretty clear that there are different rules for different people
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.
> And after the 2008 bailouts it became pretty clear that there are different rules for different people and it's ok to lie to people if you are just brazen enough.
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.
I used to be a free market guy. 2008 definitely broke something in me. Suddenly it was clear that the preachers on Wall Street that talked about “creative destruction” didn’t like that concept as much anymore when it came to them. And then I realized that the Fed and both parties only worried about the bankers and gave a sh.t about the little guy. COVID was the same. Rich got richer, poor got poorer. And inflation was blamed on the subsidies for the little guys but not on the massive money printing for the big guys. We are led by sociopaths .
Indeed. I never meant to blanket all of religion, and amended my word use a few minutes ago. I mean the personalities who go on TV and ask for your money in the name of a god.
"Christian Beliefs" and, "The Actual Practices of Christians" are too very different things. There are have been many atrocities done over hundreds of years in the name of Christ.
This guy just has a pretty (and punchable) face he's using to grift his idiot fans.
I’m always curious why people think that blame has something to do with compassion. They’re entirely orthogonal. If you only have compassion for the blameless, you may not be doing it right.
He-Man was the scam. The entire show was created specifically to sell toys to children. Before Reagan's deregulation crusade in the early 80s, that was illegal.
I think that's a bit harsh. Logan Paul is a good looking, tall, charming dude. He's highly prolific on youtube, and is also a boxer and a pro-wrestler on the side.
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.
There was a youtube video they uploaded about the logan brothers and the father take turns to kiss a girl blindfolded. So the parenthood is exactly as how it's intended
everything went right. He's from the generation of rich kids that happened upon the internet when it was possible to impress even younger children and gain audience by flaunting elements of one's wealth.
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.
Whatever generation you identify as, I'm positive it had plenty of people subscribing to celebrities and poor role models. This certainly isn't a problem if "people have forgotten how to parent".
Is the system failing? How is this not all actionable from a standpoint of fraud, failure to pay / breaking contracts, and threats? Why are there no consequences for these people? Just like the influencer who intentionally crashed his plane.
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.
I was subscribed to Coffeezilla when he was like under 50k, it's really amazing to see the journey some of these people go through to get where they are today, we definitely need more people in this scene.
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?
Isn't it kind of similar in a way, though? Musk doesn't actually have 180B does he? First, he's now worth less thanks to the Tesla stock tanking, but even then, it's not like he can just sell a bunch of stocks freely to do things with it. AIUI, he had to go through a lot of hoops to actually pay for Twitter.
Ultimately we exist in a society, a species even, that relies on persuading each other for support. Persuasion beats utility. Even very useful things often require persuasion to get people to use them.
Humans also collectively generate more ideas and products in a single day than a single person could evaluate over their entire lifetime.
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those people were actually faking everything, including their wealth. You can always rent a luxurious car for a photoshoot and pretend it’s yours..
My trust on anything happening on instagram or youtube has now reached 0
I just want to note: We have invested hard into a unregulated "currency" and now there's quite a bit of surprise and shock that regular financial protections like the ability to dispute purchases via credit cards are completely unavailable.
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.
A lot of people are surprised that Logan Paul is seen as trustworthy and that believing him is an extreme lapse in judgement.
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.
I would hope he doesn't get too big or he'll have too much to lose and not be able to do the work he does.
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.
I feel like that would destroy him honestly. Kind of like how after SoftBank gave Adam Neumann $1B and told him to "get crazy," he succumbed to his worst instincts.
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.
press credentials do not appear in the constitution. they are just press assocation members recognizing themselves. your right to freedom of press is not contingent on having press credentials.
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.
It's never good to be a scammer. It's even worse when you don't need the money. Logan Paul by any estimation is rich enough to never have to work another day in his life. Scamming money from people who aren't is a whole new level of scummy.
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.
As a general rule, I don't think we should blame the victims. If someone got scammed, we shouldn't go "well if they were smart enough they wouldn't have fallen for it".
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.
Oh wow who could have possibly predicted that putting 500k into PonziZoo would result in the owner stealing all your money. It's clearly such a sensible investment.
“… left investors feeling like they’d been led on…”
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.
For me the question is, when they lost a little, why go on to lose a lot more? I guess the gamblers galaxy was at play. Logan Paul and his ilk are masters of marketing and manipulation.
I'm not an expert on this topic, so I'd like to know as well. My own personal theory is that most people, whatever their intelligence level, feel that they are smarter than the average person and their intelligence is part of their sense of identity. When people fall victim to a scam—when they are outwitted—that sense of identity takes a big hit and it's so hard to admit that they were not as smart as they thought they were, that they were wrong about who they thought they were. And so rather than doing the rational thing which would be to admit being deceived and not seeing through it, they double-down, they want to find a way to make the scam work for them, to prove to others, but mostly themselves, that they were not dumb, that they were the smart ones.
Bingo. That's why the friend that points out you've been scammed gets more vitriol than the conman. They've basically, in objective terms, called the mark stupid.
It's just the whole GameStop pump all over again: the people who lost money knew it was a scam, but were hoping they could sell when prices were still high
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
It's well known that one feature of a market bubble that is about to burst is rampant fraud. People are flush with cash and are therefore willing to take higher risk positions with it. This is compounded by the fact that they get caught up in the contagious social euphoria that occurs when everyone is making money. On the other side of this, predators like Logan Paul go into action to take advantage of it. This is exactly what happened here. Instead of buying things with actual value, these people spent millions to hatch virtual eggs that were sold to them by a shady internet personality. This theme played out in 1929, 2000, 2008 and now again. You see it everywhere, including the recent FTX collapse, Elon Musk's Dogecoin scam (among others), and on and on.
I would also add that he's one of those people that benefit greatly from bad press. He's able to monetize the hatred. An article like this and the attention we pay him ultimately benefit him.
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.