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A new filing in a class-action lawsuit against influencer Logan Paul alleges that the YouTuber Coffeezilla, who released a three-part documentary series detailing a trail of broken promises in the development of Paul’s now-defunct NFT game Cryptozoo, is “coordinating” with one of the attorneys behind the class-action lawsuit.
According to the filing, Paul’s lawyers think that might be the case because “highly nuanced points about Mr. Paul’s alleged conduct in connection with entirely unrelated projects” made during a failed mediation attempt by the attorney, Tom Kherker, have been “parroted wholesale by Coffeezilla both in his public videos and in private messages to Mr. Paul.”
Because of their suspicions about this, Paul’s attorneys say they’ll be including discovery requests for communications between the lawyer, Tom Kherker, and Coffeezilla, whose real name is Stephen Findeisen.
The new filing came after Paul announced in January that he was launching a $2.3 million buyback program for people who’d bought tokens for Cryptozoo—as well as admitting that development of the game wouldn’t be continuing due to unnamed “regulatory hurdles.”
That move from Paul prompted Kherkher to post an “emergency update” video on his YouTube channel, where he goes by the name Attorney Tom and has just over 500,000 subscribers of his own.
The initial lawsuit alleged that Paul used his clout to trick people into buying crypto products for Cryptozoo, a Pokemon-esque trading game where you combine animals into fantastical creatures and that Paul and his team never had any intention of completing the game at all.
Paul denies that he defrauded anybody.
He’s filed his own counterclaim against two of his former employees, Eduardo Ibanez and Jake Greenbaum aka Crypto King, alleging that they were responsible for the game never being completed, a narrative which Greenbaum told the Daily Dot in early January was “completely false.”
“Logan is trying to shift blame for his conniving activities,” Greenbaum said at the time.
In Attorney Tom’s “emergency update” video, he warned that Paul’s buyback program is a “sneaky trick” to get potential class members to give up their claims against him for settlements lower than what they’d otherwise be entitled to.
While Coffeezilla’s takedown of Cryptozoo came before the suit, a day after Paul announced the buyback, Coffeezilla released his own video calling the buyback a “bargaining chip” to get the lawsuit dropped.
Less than a couple of weeks after Paul announced the buyback program, lawyers for the plaintiffs filed a lengthy amended complaint which includes the names of over 130 co-plaintiffs and their alleged losses from Cryptozoo ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now, Paul’s attorneys are claiming that Attorney Tom “expedited” filing the amended motion without conferring with Paul or his attorneys ahead of time because he’d perceived a “strategic benefit” in doing so.
They also claim that Attorney Tom is trying to “litigate this case in the media,” and that he may have violated local court rules that require a mandatory conference between attorneys.
“We have no comment on behalf of Mr. Paul,” wrote Jeffrey Neiman, one of Paul’s lawyers, in response to a question about what rules Kherker and the other lawyers for the plaintiffs might have violated.
Neither Attorney Tom or Coffeezilla replied to questions about if they were coordinating on the case.
