cryptocurrency — a scam created by a team of criminals. he has been destroying everyone. there might be influencers touting cryptfx _ beware, be cautious. it is a fresh take. you can make $250 million. it does not work. the internet is divided. who is right? is logan an influencer who simply made mistakes? i guess that is what i get for trusting the team that i relied on. or someone using the power of his influence to intentionally mislead his own followers? we are here to hold logan paul responsible for his actions. i am not bleep a scammer. allegations against logan paul relating to cryptocurrencies have been building now for well over a year. i have been investigating these allegations for about seven

months, and the whole time, trying to speak to logan paul, but his team have refused for whatever reason. and now, after all that time, they finally agreed to do an interview. so we are on the way to his boxing gym in puerto rico that he owns with his brotherjake. alright, let's go. hey, guys. there is a strange atmosphere in the room and a suspicious amount of logan's own cameras pointed at us. all of a sudden, it becomes clear why. what's up, dude? how is it going? matt? sorry, i am tired. how are you enjoying puerto rico? ah...yeah, pretty good, man. the lookalike

is clearly nervous. you look different. did you come all the way over here to ask about how i look? is logan coming? i'm right here. you came all the way to puerto rico from england. this is your interview. what have you got? these are serious questions. there are people who want answers. i'm a serious person. let's just get out of here. i'm not doing this. matt, no. you came all the way to puerto rico for this interview. chanting 50, rather than defend himself against the allegations we have been investigating, logan decided to troll us. minutes after leaving the gym, we receive a letter from lawyers on behalf of logan paul,

warning us against publishing our allegations. but these allegations against him are not going away. in fact, they have been building since 2021. september i, 2021. zoo day. this is the day that logan paul told his audience that his new nft crypto game cyptozoo would launch. it will make some waves. stay on the lookout for cyptozoo. dozens of people invested in cyptozoo, many of them logan's fans who bought in after his endorsement. logan paul entertains people and he is very good at doing that. i did not go looking for him. he just came across my feet. good morning! he has quite a larger—than—life persona. and then i think also seeing his success is something that i admired. he has a lot of projects going on

and an exciting lifestyle, which attracted me to listen to what he was saying. ruben is a 21—year—old logan paulfan who was attracted to the influencer�*s cryptozoo project. it was marketed by logan and his team as an online trading card game, but instead of cards nfts or pieces of art which exist digitally. you can't hold them in your hand, but each nft is given a unique code which identified the owner. in 2021, around the time when logan introduced cryptozoo, the crypto market was worth around $11.3 billion. to play cryptozoo, you would have to buy a zoo token, which could then buy nft eggs. they were then meant to hatch into nft animals, which could be bred into new nft hybrid animals like penguins sharks.

logan's team said these hybrid animals would then somehow make you money by passively generating more zoo token. what actually happened to the project? we were given cerrtain expectations about features that would be released. a lot of the time those features would not work. we are definitely having hiccups and working through problems that we are having and we did not see coming. at a certain point you start to realise that something is wrong. there are tons of people that have bought- and the game they. played never worked. the only reason investors were spending all their money is because they were promised features that just were not there. people have lost 80—90% of the value of the token. how did you end up losing? personally, i lost around £33,000. i blame logan paul and his manager, jeff. you listen to someone and trust what they are saying

and they betray that trust. their words don't mean anything to you anymore. to say i am disappointed is an understatement. my sole obligation is to my supporters and i know this video is long overdue. here it is. i am sorry, guys. i apologise for how this has unfolded thus far and i want people to know that they can trust me and that i will always take care of the fans and people who support me. people all over the world are now accusing logan paul of misleading his fans, encouraging them to invest in a project he never delivered and not caring about what happens to them as a result. logan has denied any wrongdoing, just admitting that some things did go wrong with the project. is this a one off or is there a pattern of logan paul being dishonest to his fans? logan himself is pretty clear. i am not a bleep scammer. i have the best intentions. logan founded cryptozoo in 2021, but he was not

the only celebrity entering the crypto space that year. something had happened eight months before zoo day that launched the world into cryptomania. this morning gamestop mania leaving a big mark on wall street. we have never seen anything like this _ millions of people decided to pump the value of a stock widely seen as worthless. and it worked, which was crazy. this one keeps going. way up — 1,600% in two weeks. this gamestop situation is the craziest i have ever seen. the gamestop saga was the first instance of a stock value being driven up by online communities sharing memes. it was at this point that people in crypto spotted an opportunity, and along came doge coin. doge coin is a cryptocurrency

based on the meme of a shiba inu dog. doge coin went up way high after this happened. crypto is fundamentally a social media driven market on some level. it is an influencer driven market. with doge coin, elon musk had a big hand in popularising it. the doge father. cheering he was a big fan. he tweeted about it all the time. but when elon tweets a meme, the money follows. therefore, twitter was driving the price and jokes were driving the price. oh, so it is a hustle? yeah, it is a hassle. someone like elon, someone like logan paul buys a ton of crypto and tells the followers about it, they are going to buy it too. in the months after doge coin, celebrity after celebrity got into crypto. and while some celebrities

were involved in legitimate crypto projects, a pattern began to emerge where every time a celebrity would endorse a token, its price would skyrocket as more people bought it, then it would crash when the large holders about token began to sell. many began to suspect that the celebrities were being used as what is known as a �*pump and dump�*. a pump and dump describes the arc of a coin or a stock that goes up and then it goes way down. the thinking being that the creator made the coin with the intention of pumping it — "hey, by this thing" — and then people buy it, they sell, coin goes down and everyone loses money except for the person buying the strings. this is classic thing the sec goes after. the sec regulates 40% of the world's capital markets

from here in washington, dc. that is about $110 trillion and one person oversees it all. are you invested in crypto? i am not personally. but everyone i know is personally. why are they doing that with their hard—earned money? because it does seem, especially if you look on social media, like an easy way to get rich. but it is not. the crypto space itself is rife with fraud. gary gensler is the chair of the security exchange commission, the person in charge of regulating the us exchange markets, including the stock market and now crypto. what is the scale of this? how much money are people losing because of these frauds? individuals have lost collectively tens of billions of dollars. many of these projects are not complying with the law. even the good—faith actors in this field are not necessarily giving you,

the investing public, the disclosure. and the influencers arejust...making it worse. and why? because folks are vulnerable to thinking that, well, they are so successful at life, they are so successful, they must know something, but they are really misleading their followers. kim kardashian lands in hot water with the sec for promoting a cryptocurrency asset on instagram. they are supposed to tell you how much they got paid, whether they own the token, whether they know anything. and we have brought a number of cases in these areas over the years. these celebrities were fined between $50,000 and $400,000 by the sec for promoting a token to their followers without disclosing their own vested interests. these interests could be that, like kim kardashian, they were paid to promote the token

or then they already own large amounts of the token, meaning they stand to gain financially by the price been driven up following the endorsements. if a token is promoted by one of the celebrities with the intention of selling large holdings when the price goes up, this is what is known as a pump and dump. is the sec at all interested in logan paul? influences, whatever their name, do not go out and tout something and mislead the public. because it is illegal. yeah, and it is also wrong. there is no evidence the sec is looking into logan paul, but some of logan's fans are calling for an investigation. their concerns are not just about cryptozoo, but a number of other crypto projects he supported that year. i spent a lot on crypto projects because gary told me it was

the next facebook. one of the meme projects he took on is called elon gate. elon gate made me rich! in early may 2021, logan paul posted this video about elongate to his fans in the mavericks club, a club which gives his fans exclusive content. excitement for elongate grew. after his video to the maverick club, the price of elongate rose massively to an all—time high. it remained at this price for a matter of hours before owners began selling, crashing the price. we cannot be sure of logan's intention before he sent the video to the maverick club. new meme were launching daily so few people thought to ask why logan paul

was promoting these coins to his fans. that changed with dink doink. logan endorsed the project to his over 6 million twitter followers injune 2021. the effect of these promotions was immediate. it encouraged his fans to buy. how much did you invest in dink doink? i think in total a little over $3,000. early investors in dink doink helped push the price of the token up by over 400% in just four days. so, does that celebrity factor, having people like logan paul attached to this, give you more confidence in the overall value of the coin? i have always enjoyed his content. it seems like they could get a lot done if they wanted to. following a pattern similar to elongate, after logan's endorsements, the price of dink doink climbed to its peak before large holders began selling,

causing the price to fall by 96% in two weeks. but why was logan so vocal in promoting dink doink? after the price crash, logan paul tried to distance himself from dink doink, saying that he was just a fan of the funny litle spring character. but apparently, according to his mate, logan had a bigger role to play in the creation of dink doink than he lets on. i was chilling with logan and we were, like, "what is the stupidest name we could think of for a coin?" we were, like, "dink doink!" it came alive. logan designed the character on his phone, on snapchat. if jake is telling the truth, then logan was not being straight with the fans he encouraged to invest in dink doink. so, if logan was a creator of the token as alleged, you would have thought he would have disclosed his interest in the project doing well.

but was there a financial incentive too? an unknown crypto wallet bought 120 trillion dink doink tokens just three minutes after it became available injune 2021, but before the token was publicly promoted on twitter. injuly, after logan and his friends' endorsements when the coin still held value, that wallet began selling tons of dink doink, essentially cashing out on the coin and causing the price to plummet. then that same wallet sent thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to logan paul's public crypto wallet. no—one knows for sure who this wallet belongs to. but we do know that it belongs to one of the founders of cryptozoo. founders of the project were gifted zoo token and this wallet received 95 billion of them, which led some people to believe the wallet belongs to logan paul himself.

we asked logan paul about this, and while he did not deny the wallet was his, he denied making money in any gifted dink doink tokens and said he was not involved in the development other than supporting his friend. what would you say to people who say this is more of a pump—and—dump situation? a lot of celebrities get a lot of pain from a lot of people. it is understandable that a lot of people see it like that, but i don't. 0mi i think is, like, anotherone. bro, bro, what are you saying?! you have the same weird coins no—one has heard of. omi is linked to ecomi. after his podcast, logan sent a video message to an advisor at ecomi. yo, ben, we need more of these. please, bro, please. eod if possible because we have

things coming tomorrow. let's go, bleep! let's go! the man they are speaking to is ben gadenzie, a mysterious figure who has been in the crypto scene for 10 years. part of his job in the industry is to allegedly help bring celebrities and influencers on to projects to promote them. and it appears logan and his guest both got their omi tokens for him. they then asked for more tokens before releasing their podcasts and just like before, logan's followers then bought into the cryptocurrency, causing the price of their own holdings to rise dramatically. shortly after, the price crashed. although we can't be sure what logan's intentions were, investigators that we spoke to told us that the general trading around omi in 2021

showed the components typically seen in a pump and dump. and just two months after omi, behind closed doors, logan paul and his team began developing what would become cryptozoo — their nft trading card game. linked to the game was their own cryptocurrency, zoo token, which would be needed to buy the cryptozoo eggs. but logan seemed keen to get a hold of these tokens before anyone else. these messages are from may 20, 2021, months before the public had even heard about cryptozoo. they are private messages between team members including logan's cryptozoo advisorjake greenbaum, the crypto king, logan paul himself, his manager and lead developer. the team were discussing how they could get as—yet—unreleased tokens before the public. jake greenbaum suggested

the team could buy up the tokens early by accessing them in what is known as a liquidity pool — a store of tokens put aside to help the market if there are issues with it being traded. but they appear to have been using a liquidity pool to launch the token in secret. accessing tokens before the public started buying. you have got to remember that at the time, the public had no idea about this stealth launch. logan won't mention cryptozoo publicly for months. they were all waiting for zoo day, the day logan paul said cryptozoo would launch. when the eggs finally did become available, they sold out almost immediately. cryptozoo, let's go. but as quickly as they sold out... i attempted to get some eggs and had a massive fail through their binance website, which did not work. ..the complaints begin to appear. less than two weeks

after the public launch, logan stopped speaking about cryptozoo completely. over the next year, complaints would build. cryptozoo investors claimed the game did not work. when they were able to eventually buy eggs, they often would not hatch, and even when they did, there was no way for holders to earn the zoo token that they were promised. as criticism of cryptozoo built and the game failed to materialise, the price of zoo token plummeted, losing most of its value. there were promised features that were not there. not a word about the scam. as more and more crypto investors began to allege that they were being scammed... they thought this time it is different. logan paul couldn't possibly scam us...right? youtuber coffeezilla released a viral web series alleging that cryptozoo was indeed a scam.

there is nothing that doesn't say it is a complete scam. it prompted logan to speak about cryptozoo for the first time in one year. coffeezilla, i now know your motives. money, but you are also the slimy is bleep. we will handle this ourselves while we continue to build cryptozoo and i will see you in court. in spight of the response, fans who purchased zoo tokens and the nft eggs were left with essentually useless assets. john holland is a police officer and was one of the earliest investigators into cryptozoo. here is the egg that i have. and the current worth is...zero. i have hatched an egg, i have read an egg and i have eggs and animals. so, what is it called? a littem. does this animal create passive income for you?

no. 0k. it doesn't work, so... don is the lead claimant in a class—action lawsuit against logan paul brought by investors who believe they have lost out and want their money back. it is being led by one of the biggest lawyers on youtube. we are taking legal action against cryptozoo incorporated — logan paul and jake greenbaum. logan paul is named as a defendant in a class—action lawsuit! while the failure to deliver the game that was promised is a key part of tom's case, it is not the only one. he is also interested in this stealth launch discussed in the leaked messagees between logan and his team.

a text message that says, "definitely don't want to do anything "that brings sec eyeballs." you can see logan, "everyone does presale point. why can't we?" just because everyone else does it does not make it ok. what they did is they dump the zoo token on the exchanges and then they go in and buy them while they are worth nothing. then they set the rules for selling. the team appear to agree that they can begin selling once the total value of all of the zoo token in circulation hits $200 million with rules on how much the founders can then sell in a given day. those are rules for market manipulation. i totally, totally see why people are frustrated. logan claimed he only ever lost money on cryptozoo and that he never dumped his tokens. we made no money on the project, which i think kills the scam narrative immediately. although logan never made

money from cryptozoo, something happened during their stealth launch that meant other members of the team did. someone outside the group was buying and selling zoo token and causing the total value to fall, costing logan and his team millions. do you see how crazy this is? he is upset that the currency is being manipulated when it was his manipulation game. it turns out the additional wallets that bought and sold during the stealth launch apparently belonged to jake greenbaum and eddie, while the other founders raised the price, eddie and jake began dumping tokens from the wallets, secretly cashing out behind logan and his team's back. con man eddie, lead developer, sold 1.7 million. crypto king jake stole $6 million. true or not, we had removed him from the team when we realised he was a bad actor and his motives were purely financial, and i guess that is what i get

for trusting the team that i relied on. jake greenbaum has since denied wrongdoing, claiming that he did not make $6 million and that he himself lost out on tokens due to having his wallet and tokens frozen by logan paul. logan has since claimed that he had little oversight over the launch of this new token, and instead deferred to eddie and jake on the launch. logan points to text messages leading up to the stealth launch, and on the day of the launch itself, that he believes show his lack of involvement. but on the day that the launch happens, logan appears to have been aware of the team's plans to buy up tokens early without anyone else getting in. did logan paul get backstabbed? absolutely. i am not debating that. he trusted some bad people, but were his intentions pure? i don't think so.

the bad publicity around cryptozoo has not appeared to stop logan from his other ventures, but logan is no longer silent in the face of the public criticism he is receiving. i am sorry, guys. he apologised and offered what he called a buyback problem. step 2 — we want to offer a rewards programme for players who are disappointed in the status of the game. he has also gone on the offensive, launching a defamation suit against coffeezilla. rather than pay back his victims fully, logan would rather accuse me of defaming him. while it might seem that logan has survived the scandal and is in the clear, with hundreds of investors out of pocket still demandming their money back, claiming they were misled, it seems that he will not be able to silence the allegations against him — allegations that he used his influence on the internet in unethical ways. i feel like the internet has given people a lot of confidence in themselves

and the freedom to reallyjust say and do what they want online. oftentimes without repercussions. hello there. the weather is set to stay pretty unsettled, as we head towards the weekend, but it's not a complete wash—out. there will be some drier, brighter interludes from time to time before the wet and windy weather moves through, and then it will turn noticeably colder, particularly for the second half of the weekend. so one weather front has been bringing some heavy rain — that's sweeping its way east. a brief lull, but only briefly...

live from seoul, this is bbc news. pressure mounts on south korea's president yoon. the opposition has formally started an impeachment process. the ruling party says they won't back it, but the party chief has asked him to leave the party. and from political chaos in south korea to parliamentary collapse in france. prime minister michel barnier loses a vote of no confidence in parliament. and the chief executive of a major us health insurance company is shot dead on the streets of new york city. a manhunt is under way.

welcome to newsday. i'm steve lai, live in seoul, where the question on everyone's lips is what is going to happen to president yoon suk—yeol? protesters are calling for his removal. the opposition have formally introduced impeachment proceedings, accusing him of declaring martial law to stop criminal investigations into himself and his family. but the ruling people power party has decided to vote against the prospective impeachment. that means that unless some of the ruling party members break from their ranks, the motion will not pass. the opposition says they plan to have the vote at 7pm on saturday. despite not voting to oust him entirely, the party chief has asked the president to leave the party. so he doesn't have their full support. meanwhile, the minister of defence has resigned,

claiming full responsibility for the declaration of martial law.