Coffeezilla Built a Channel Calling Out Scams. Logan Paul Is Suing Him for Calling One Out.

Stephen Findeisen built his YouTube channel, Coffeezilla, on a simple premise: investigate the people and projects the rest of the internet is too afraid, too paid, or too lazy to check. In December 2022 he pointed that premise at Logan Paul’s failed NFT game, CryptoZoo, and called it a scam. Eighteen months later, Paul sued him for defamation. The case is still unresolved.

From selling houses to investigating scams full time

Findeisen, who holds a chemical engineering degree from Texas A&M, was selling homes for a builder before he started making videos, according to Wikipedia’s sourced account of his career. He has said his mother was sold questionable products during a cancer diagnosis, which is what pushed him toward investigating scams; she later recovered after surgery. His first channel, Coffee Break, ran from 2017 to 2020 before he moved to the “coffeezilla” channel that’s run since 2018. As of July 6, 2026, Wikipedia’s sourced figure puts the channel at 4.69 million subscribers and 591 million total views — in the same range independent channel-stat trackers reported earlier in the year, around 4.5 million subscribers as of March 2026.

The investigations that got him there are a list of some of the creator economy’s messiest stories: the 2021 Save the Kids token pump-and-dump involving FaZe Clan members, the April 2022 SafeMoon liquidity-pool allegations, three on-camera interviews with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried before his 2022 collapse and eventual 25-year prison sentence, a December 2024 three-part series on gambling-site sponsorships in the CS:GO and CS2 scenes, and a February 2025 interview with Hayden Davis about the $LIBRA token collapse. The December 2022 CryptoZoo series — three videos accusing Paul of collecting NFT buyer funds without paying the developers who were supposed to build the game — is the one that’s now in federal court.

A threat Paul dropped, then a lawsuit he filed anyway

Paul didn’t sue right away. In the last week of December 2022 he posted response videos calling Findeisen’s CryptoZoo coverage a “defamatory hit piece” and threatened legal action, according to Decrypt’s reporting at the time. On January 7, 2023, he reversed course: Decrypt reported he told Findeisen directly that he was deleting the response videos and dropping the threat, writing in a Discord message that the threatened lawsuit had been “rash and misaligned with the true issue at hand” and that “the war is not with Coffee.”

Eighteen months later, on June 27, 2024, Paul filed a defamation suit against Findeisen and his production company anyway, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (case No. 5:24-cv-00717), seeking $75,000 in damages plus legal fees, according to The Block’s reporting on the filing. The complaint alleges Findeisen “maliciously and repeatedly” published false statements accusing Paul of running a scam and argues Paul never intended to defraud CryptoZoo’s buyers. The newsletter The Publish Press reported that Findeisen said the suit was filed hours before he was set to publish an exposé on a different Paul-connected venture, Liquid Marketplace — a crypto-collectibles platform Paul co-founded. Separately, and on the public record: Ontario’s securities regulator filed an enforcement application on June 19, 2024, just over a week before Paul sued Findeisen, accusing three named Liquid Marketplace executives — not Paul, who the outlet BetaKit reported was “not named in the proceeding” — of diverting roughly $3 million of investor money through hidden payments and unpaid loans.

Where the case stands, and what it’s cost him

The suit hasn’t gone away quietly. In March 2025, Magistrate Judge Henry Bemporad recommended denying Findeisen’s motion to dismiss, finding — per Cointelegraph’s report on the filing — that Paul had “sufficiently alleged” defamatory statements and that Findeisen’s claims were framed as fact rather than protected opinion. A jury trial scheduled for May 4, 2026 in front of U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia didn’t go forward; as of a July 10, 2026 docket check reported by OpenClassActions, the case remains in pretrial proceedings with no new trial date set and no settlement or dismissal on record.

Fighting it hasn’t been free. The Publish Press reported that Findeisen’s media insurance doesn’t cover defamation claims, that his attorney estimated legal costs could run upward of $500,000, and that Findeisen turned to Patreon and a merch drop — shirts reading “Waiting For Refunds” and “Thank You – I’m Suing” — to help cover it. His attorney, Bill Ogden of Farrar & Ball LLP, told the creator-economy newsletter Passionfruit that taking the case felt like “a David versus Goliath story, and David just happened to be on the defensive side,” calling Paul’s claim an “uphill battle.” Net-worth sites publish wildly different figures for Findeisen, from roughly $1 million to $17 million — numbers that don’t agree closely enough, or trace to disclosed financials closely enough, for us to report any of them as fact.

What our checker would add — and why we didn’t run it

Findeisen’s channel is on YouTube, one of the two platforms — alongside Twitch — our free authenticity checker scores with live data rather than a modeled estimate. We didn’t run that check for this piece, and nothing here states or implies a numeric authenticity score for his account. A channel with a publicly documented Texas A&M degree, a years-long track record of named, court-citable investigations, and an active federal lawsuit with its own public docket doesn’t need a synthetic score to establish the account is real. If you want a live read anyway, you can run it yourself at /check/youtube/coffeezilla.

The bottom line

A creator who built an audience by calling out other creators’ scams is now defending himself, in federal court, against the one he called out most publicly — on claims a magistrate judge has already said are specific enough to go forward, with no trial date, no settlement, and real money already spent. Both halves of that are checkable against public filings and named reporting, which is a higher bar than most creator-lawsuit stories clear.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Coffeezilla”; The Block, “Logan Paul sues Coffeezilla for defamation over CryptoZoo coverage” (Jordan Leech, June 28, 2024); Decrypt, “Logan Paul Drops Threat to Sue Coffeezilla Over CryptoZoo Criticism” (Kate Irwin, January 9, 2023); Cointelegraph, “Coffeezilla should not duck Logan Paul CryptoZoo claims — Suit judge” (Jesse Coghlan, March 28, 2025); OpenClassActions, “Logan Paul vs Coffeezilla Lawsuit: Where the Case Stands” (Steve Levine, July 10, 2026); The Publish Press, “Coffeezilla Goes on Defense” (Hannah Doyle & Nathan Graber-Lipperman, August 7, 2024); BetaKit, “OSC accuses Liquid MarketPlace of fraud and pursues action against startup, top execs” (Josh Scott, June 24, 2024); Passionfruit, “Coffeezilla’s Lawyer Is Ready To Defend ‘David Versus Goliath’” (Steven Asarch, August 12, 2024).