In late 2021, 20-year-old Rueben Tauk asked his father for £50,000 ($67,000 at the time) to invest in YouTuber Logan Paul’s crypto project, CryptoZoo. Paul, one of the most famous influencers in the world, described CryptoZoo as a game in which you could hatch and breed hybrid NFT animals that would gain in value over time. Speaking in August 2021 to his massive audience of the podcast Impaulsive, which has 4 million subscribers on YouTube, Paul had called it “a really fun game that makes you money.” In October that year, he called it “probably even more relatable and universal than Pokemon” in Forbes.

Tauk, who is from Newcastle, U.K., enjoyed Paul’s podcast and videos. He had already put £30,000 of his own money into the project, which he had earned from some savvy crypto investments. But he was convinced that this project was going to explode in popularity and gain in value enormously. So he asked his father for a loan. “I was brainwashed. I was like, ‘Logan Paul is a trustworthy guy. He makes good content and kind of leads the space,’” Tauk says. “So I invested a lot more, sourced from my family.”

More than a year later, Tauk and his father have lost almost all of that investment. CryptoZoo still does not exist as a game, and as of the day of publication, the value of its tokens has plummeted to less than a hundredth of its August 2021 peak. Paul, who told TIME in April 2022 that his involvement with the project was “super minimal,” now faces a lawsuit that is requesting class action status from CryptoZoo buyers who find themselves down thousands of dollars, just like Tauk.

The lawsuit was filed just after this article’s publication. Tom Kherkher, an attorney spearheading the effort, alleges that Paul committed fraud, express breach of contract and negligence among other claims, and seeks damages for the some of the people who lost thousands on CryptoZoo.

“[Paul and others behind with CryptoZoo] made the business decision to forego an expensive and time-consuming process to create a functional CryptoZoo game or support it, and instead deliberately undertook a scheme to defraud Plaintiff and other consumers,” the lawsuit reads. Filed in the Western District of Texas, the lawsuit also states that there may be thousands of “victims” who are eligible to join if granted class action status.

After the lawsuit’s release, Paul’s legal representative Jeffrey Neiman issued the following statement to TIME: “This is a careless civil action, which is dramatically flawed and filed with the intention of generating headlines, not merit. We are confident that once reviewed in a court of law, this matter will swiftly be dismissed.”

A representative for Logan Paul declined to comment on all other questions or address the specific claims in the lawsuit.

On January 13th, Paul pledged to relinquish his stake in the game, refund holders at least $1.3 million, and finish the game. “To say I am disappointed in how this was handled internally is an understatement,” he said at the time.

But CryptoZoo is not the only crypto project spearheaded by Logan Paul that has gone awry. Over the past two years, Paul has dedicated a huge chunk of time building a vast crypto empire: serving as a founder of multiple projects and rallying his millions of fans to invest in the next big thing in cryptocurrency. But a pattern has emerged, in which he touts a project’s success, only to abandon it when things go south. And in the instance of the meme coin Dink Doink, blockchain evidence suggests that Paul profited enormously off a token he promoted to his fans after failing to disclose his own role in creating the project.

CryptoZoo

As cryptocurrency has risen in popularity over the last few decades, thousands of new crypto tokens, games and NFTs have been created out of thin air by entrepreneurs. Some projects, like CryptoPunks and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, have proved valuable for buyers: their prices rose dramatically in 2021, giving their buyers perks and allowing them access into exclusive social clubs. Other tokens, like Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTT, rose before crashing to near zero.

Before venturing into crypto, Paul had risen to fame as a video blogger. While he earned notoriety for posting footage of himself with a dead body in a Japanese forest, his enormous popularity persisted, with Insider naming him the most famous influencer in the world in 2021. Paul became a WWE wrestler in 2022 and recently appeared on the Royal Rumble stage.

Paul told TIME last April that he had been introduced to crypto by the entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. “The technology felt very inevitable. Verification on digital assets: I don’t know why that just made so much sense to me,” he said.

The influencer began his crypto journey as an NFT collector, buying over 100 NFTs for more than $2 million over the course of 2021. In the summer of that year, Paul went one step further and created his own NFT project: CryptoZoo. The idea was partially inspired by Pokémon. People could use a new crypto token created by the project’s founders, called Zoo, to buy a virtual NFT egg. The egg could then hatch into a hybrid animal, like an elephant-panda. If you bred one animal with another, it could produce an even more rare and valuable animal, that you could turn back into crypto, and then into cash.

Paul said that he had put a million dollars of his own money into making the game, and had hired top-notch artists and engineers. In October 2021, he told Forbes that the project “could be one of the biggest things I do.”

On its launch day on Sept. 3, 2021, the project’s initial 10,000 “Base Eggs” sold out within minutes. One buyer, Dan, who goes by cptdandan online, bought several thousand dollars worth of Zoo from his home in Sydney, Australia. Like Tauk, he also heard about CryptoZoo from Paul’s podcast.

“I basically thought that if it gets a good marketing push from this guy that’s so world-renowned, it will take off,” Dan says. (Dan works in financial services and requested TIME not print his last name out of professional concerns.) Dan also has two children, and thought the animal aspect had family appeal. “If the game is any good and it can make you money, it could be something that you can play on the side, and my kids can have a go,” he says.