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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.

3 comments

> 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.

NYT on Paul [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/technology/crypto-influen...

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.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...

He didn't question that they weren't lazy, just that they gave in to threats.

Could be an age gap. It's mostly dumb kids that get scammed and newspapers target older people.

It's completely possible to live outside the crypto bubble- thank god.

The mainstream media has been pretty soft on SBF. Maybe because they saw him as one of their own?

I had to look up the guy - turns out he's just some youtuber/influencer. Not surprised that MSM and most people don't care.

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.

What position does Coffee have to not worry about these legal threats?

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.

This sort of thing seems to happen around the British royal family a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...

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?

[1]: https://youtu.be/FDqhM7vHR2o?t=885

Thank you for digging that up and confirming! Not sure why it seems like your comment was downvoted.

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.

[1] https://www.gibsondunn.com/recent-developments-in-california...