If you can amass enough followers, you can gain influence, and effectively make a living from it. This makes the necessity to vet who you follow, listen to, and most importantly give your money to that much more important.
One popular YouTube journalist, Coffeezilla, has dedicated his life to exposing those looking to use their influence to scam consumers. And, most recently, while setting up a sting on an ex-Ju Jitsu prodigy turned professional MMA troll, Dillon Danis, Coffeezilla revealed the crux of many influencer scams.
Dillon Danis first made headlines in the MMA (mixed martial arts) community, in 2016, after being asked to help Conor McGregor train for an upcoming bout against Nate Diaz. Once he became one of Conor's main training partners, Dillon began leveraging his newfound limelight to build a social media following -- largely copying Conor's fashion sense and adopting a villain role of his own.
Now, Dillon is most known for being a Twitter troll often speaking out about fighters and flaunting his supposed wealth. After a heated debate with award-winning MMA journalist, on his podcast, The MMA Hour, Ariel Helwani, the normally conservative journalist referred to Dillon as a "sh*t stain on MMA".
And despite presenting as a professional fighter, Dillon hasn't fought since 2019 due to a string of injuries. So, the 2-0 MMA fighter set his fights on the influencer boxing scene. Most recently, he was scheduled to box viral sensation, KSI, but had to pull out, claiming to be "underprepared."
During this time of inactivity, Dillon has been making a living through his Instagram and Twitter pages -- selling shoutouts, endorsements, and doing whatever he can to stay in the public eye. This caught the attention of Coffeezilla, as he noticed Dillon often promoting faceless cryptocurrency companies.
During the crypto craze of 2020-2022, after seeing the success of "meme coins", such as Dogecoin (endorsed by Elon Musk), many companies would engage in what are called "pump and dump" schemes. Essentially, they would create a coin or NFT project with a fun name, make a website and social pages, and hire influencers to promote it -- with nothing aside from public opinion to back it.
As more people invested, the coin/project's stock would rise only to be sold -- with companies claiming bankruptcy or simply disappearing. Although it's not illegal to endorse bad products, it's ethically questionable. And, many influencers have made a fortune promoting these companies in bad faith, at the expense of their followers.
So, in early 2022, Coffeezilla decided to set up a sting on Dillon -- to see if he would promote a crypto project to his 300,000+ Twitter followers without having any idea of what he was endorsing.
He created a fake NFT project, modelled after Logan Paul's Crypto Zoo, a project Dillon had publicly called a scam, with the goal of seeing if Dillon would do any real due diligence at all. Or, would he simply take the money, effectively scamming his followers.
In a video titled, "I Scammed this Influencer So He Couldn't Scam You", Coffeezilla created the shell (a landing page & Twitter account) of a new project called "Sourz.gg", and went undercover, reaching out to Dillon to endorse it. After some negotiation, Dillon agreed to a 24-hour post for $5,000.
“Nano influencers” (1K–10K followers): $10 - $100 per post
“Micro influencers” (10K–50K followers): $100 -$500 per post
“Mid-tier influencers” (50K –500K followers): $500 -$5,000 per post
“Macro influencers” (500K–1 million followers): $5000 - $10,000 per post
“Mega influencers” (1 million+ followers): $10,000+ per post
Although at this point, it may seem like Dillon has done nothing wrong, Coffeezilla made sure to hide his intentions in plain sight, to see if Dillon did any due diligence when promoting financial advice to his followers. He created a contract for the promotional deal, laying out the entire scheme, with quotes like:
"The Purpose, herein, agrees to be the butt of the joke... Promoters' due diligence can often be surprisingly sparse... [and the kicker]... The purpose of this project is to redirect all traffic arising to this Tweet... to raising awareness about the Artist's prior promotions."
All the details of Coffeezilla's scheme were right there for Dillon to see.
But, of course, like most influencers, Dillon didn't read the contract and promptly posted the Tweet:
Although it's hard not to feel a little sorry for Dillon for the string of losses he's taken in recent years, it serves a very important purpose for influencers -- to actually look into what they're promoting.
Coffeezilla's goal is to expose the inner workers of influencer scams to the public. And for influencers to,
"Get to the point where influencers will wonder, when they take these deals in the future, am I agreeing to be the butt of a joke."
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