Bitboy is one of the biggest crypto YouTubers/influencers with an incredible 1.44 million subscribers, but he hasn’t been immune to controversy. He’s variously been accused of promoting a long list of scams including DISTX, Zao Finance and Pamp Network, the latter of which dropped to nearly zero after BitBoy promoted it.
Battle of the influencers
Source: Twitter
Pamp was also the subject of a video by fellow YouTuber Atozy (1.24 million subscribers). Uploaded in November 2021, ‘This Youtuber Scams His Fans… Bitboy Crypto’ accuses BitBoy of shilling scams and rugs. BitBoy struck back, filing a defamation lawsuit against Atozy and claiming that the video caused harm to his business as well as “emotional distress.”
Atozy promptly took to Twitter, accusing BitBoy of launching a "frivolous" lawsuit and starting a crowd funder to cover “the insane costs.” An outpouring of support and cash followed. Popular crypto personality Cobie pledged $100k as the funding effort raised $200,000 in less than 24 hours.
Source: Twitter
Perhaps swayed by the barrage of bad publicity, BitBoy promptly withdrew the lawsuit, stating "sorry that this became public" and “Atozy, you won." Now he claims that he never wanted to go through the courts, only for Atozy to take the video down or at least remove specific parts that BitBoy says are inaccurate. These would include an "insinuation" that he’s in trouble with the SEC/cointelegraph.com/news/atozy-you-ve-won-bitboy-drops-defamation-lawsuit-200k-defense-raised. A series of tweets about haters suggest that the story simply went much further than BitBoy ever expected.
Influencers, scams and minimal consequences
The final papers now appear to have been filed. Atozy has pledged to refund all the money and as of today, his video remains up - with no parts edited out. This isn't the first time that BitBoy’s recommendations have been spotlighted. Crypto sleuth ZachXBT launched an investigation back in January that uncovered 7 direct scams promoted by the YouTuber.
Source: Twitter
Further to his investigations, ZachXBT contacted BitBoy’s team as a prospective advertiser. BitBoy has always claimed that his team performs due diligence on everything that he promotes, but ZachXBT encountered no such scrutiny. The team just told him their prices and expected to be paid. Worse still, he tracked the various coins and tokens touted by BitBoy as moonshots in 2021 - most of them resulted in catastrophic losses, one losing as much as 95% of its value. His most trusted coin DistX lost 99% and is now nearly worthless.
BitBoy has since expressed regret for promoting these projects, admitting that he earned around $30,000 per endorsement but feels bad about the losses sustained by his followers. Whatever his intentions and your opinion on the aborted lawsuit, crypto clearly has a problem with paid promotion. Until something changes, we’ll continue to see massive profits for the influencers and crushing losses for their followers.
Sources
https://twitter.com/atozy
https://twitter.com/zachxbt
https://twitter.com/cobie/
