Crypto YouTuber Coffeezilla has received a wave of abusive emails from angry Andrew Tate fans after he quizzed the alleged human trafficker on his sketchy crypto endorsements.

Coffeezilla began receiving the messages just hours after attempting to enquire about a series of crypto projects Tate has promoted, including $VENOM, $DADDY, and the reportedly hacked $ROOST coin.

He also asked Tate about his attempts to get his The Real World coin ($TRW) regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) despite him previously tweeting, “SEC come for me, there’s no SEC in Romania, we’re scammers.” 

This line of questioning clearly rubbed Tate the wrong way. He promptly uploaded a dramatic and rambling video response in which he implies that Coffezilla is investigating memecoins going up and down, and even shouts “I’m loved, nobody likes you, nobody’s scared of your fucking investigations, your emails sound gay.”

“I asked Andrew Tate about his crypto scams and I think he sent the ‘War Room’ after me,” tweeted the YouTuber. He then posted a screenshot of Tate asking his followers to call him “gay” in emails. 

Many of the emails subsequently aimed at Coffeezilla do indeed use a raft of homophobic slurs — in between promoting Tate’s $DADDY crypto.

Read more: Andrew Tate brags he made millions on PancakeSwap, disses meme coins

At one point, Tate suggests he “accidentally leaked” Coffeezilla’s email. Despite this, he immediately claims he “regrets nothing I’ve ever done,” and later encourages his followers to send more abusive emails. 

“Once I bust this case for sex trafficking, keep your fucking sister, mother, away from me or they’ll end up working,” Tate said. Needless to say, his video failed to answer any of Coffeezilla’s questions.

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In recent years, crypto influencers have rebranded ‘newsletter guru’ and ‘trading signals’ communities under a new name: ‘alpha drops.’

These groups of mostly young, male, English-speaking crypto influencers congregate on social media platforms like Discord, Telegram, or WhatsApp to hear so-called leaders flex newfound wealth in an effort to lure followers into buying subscriptions by promising to share their best trades.

‘Alpha’ is a Greek finance term that refers to an asset’s excess return relative to a benchmark index like the S&P 500. It is the idiosyncratic price, isolated from broad, correlated movements of assets. In finance, ‘seeking alpha’ is the goal of non-passive investors, as this measures their success at outperformance.

In crypto lingo, ‘alpha drops’ occur when a guru alerts followers about an asset that he believes will outperform the market. Given the high-risk profile of the average altcoin investor, subscribers expect alpha of tens if not hundreds of percentage points and, incredibly, they expect this outperformance within hours or, at a maximum, days.

Crypto alpha drops

Now known simply as ‘alpha groups,’ subscriptions to these gurus’ inner circles can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. The sales journey for a new subscriber often begins with word-of-mouth referrals, previews shared on free social media channels, or highlights of profitable trades.

In general, leaders of alpha groups aim to instill a fear of missing out (FOMO) in their audience, convincing them to subscribe. Highlights shared on social media are overwhelmingly profitable, often overstating entries and exits to illustrate the maximum percentage gain.

Losing alpha drops are usually ignored or deleted.

Membership charges start as low as $5 but they quickly go up from there. Indeed, Andrew Tate’s alpha group starts at $49.99 a month and increases massively depending on how many chatrooms the user wants to join within his Discord channels.

Other crypto alpha groups charge $50, $70, $100, $140, and some well over $1,000 a month.

Although it’s difficult to find reviews of the cheaper groups, the most expensive ones generated visible complaints on social media.

Read more: What happened to influential crypto pumper Teeka Tiwari?

Andrew Tate’s Hustlers pyramid scheme

Many investigators have called Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University a pyramid scheme whereby new subscribers, rather than making money from their education, are led to sell more subscriptions once subscribed. Tate’s subscription product has rebranded and intermittently shut down amid various social media bans over the years, with 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ‘Academy,’ and ‘The Real World’ among its shifting naming conventions.

In promo videos referring to charting software, Tate once said, “You’re guaranteed to make money with this system. Hold on tight, you’re about to get rich.” Needless to say, that didn’t happen for thousands of disappointed unsubscribers.

Crypto alpha drops inside Tate’s group were once the most expensive tier of the service, costing up to $2,000. As it turns out, making money trading digital assets that trend toward $0 is harder than it seems.

Nowadays, crypto is an unremarkable topic in Tate’s group with no price premium alongside common ‘work from home’ topics like wholesaling, freelancing, dropshipping, copywriting, e-commerce, and romance scams.

Read more: Andrew Tate says he doesn’t endorse shitcoins but he definitely did

Nansen was another high-profile alpha group that ratcheted up prices from $99 to 1 ether (1 ether is now worth $2,578) per month for access. Users complained of low profits or losing money entirely on its alpha drops, claiming that the inconsistency of trading alerts didn’t correlate with its astronomical price.

All the best and none of the rest

In general, crypto alpha drop groups are just another iteration of a decades-old confidence scam. Self-proclaimed investment gurus spend most of their time broadcasting their winning trades on social media, luring customers into high-priced monthly subscriptions.

Once inside the membership area, the quality of alerts is nebulous, record-keeping is mostly non-existent, and complaints have trouble surfacing on social media as an endless stream of new promotions broadcast cherry-picked winners.

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Andrew Tate claims he’s cashed in a portion of his bitcoin holdings and invested the funds into GameStop following a new wave of hype around the controversial stock. However, he can’t seem to decide on a figure.

Tate initially said he made a $50,000 investment into GameStop before changing this to half a million. He then upped the ante even more, claiming that he’d actually allotted $6 million worth of his crypto to destroy hedge funds.

The hype around GameStop was fuelled by the return of investment-focused social media personality Roaring Kitty, who helped inspire the initial GameStop rally in 2021.

When Kitty posted on X (formerly Twitter) for the first time in three years today, GameStop’s price reportedly doubled. In response, Nasdaq has halted the trading of the stock 18 times today, likely due to the sudden price swings. 

However, these swings apparently haven’t deterred Tate, who claims he’ll hold onto the stock regardless as “PERMA DONATIONS TO THE CAUSE AGAINST THE SYSTEM.” 

The controversial influencer then described the investment as a ‘spiritual battle’ and claimed that it’s about “pissing off some dork somewhere on wall street with a fucking vaccine and a tiny Johnson.”

Read more: Andrew Tate brags he made millions on PancakeSwap, disses meme coins

Tate still faces legal troubles in a number of court cases, including four women in the UK suing him over alleged rape and assault and the continuation of his human trafficking case in Romania. 

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Controversial internet personality and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate claims he made $85 million on Binance-supported, so-called decentralized exchange PancakeSwap.

Tate, who currently faces — and denies — charges of rape, sexual assault, and human trafficking in Romania and the UK, didn’t provide any dates, coin prices, or wallet addresses to allow researchers to investigate his claim. This has, understandably led many to doubt that he could have made so much money on such a relatively obscure exchange.

However, as usual, the truth of his claims barely mattered as he quickly parlayed that incredible PancakeSwap claim into a promotional advertisement for his $49/month Discord group. There, he boasted, customers can learn about future pumps and dumps.

They can also apparently pay for more Discord access, including a multi-thousand-dollar upsell payable in chargeback-proof bitcoin.

Yes, Tate has openly advertised early access to pumps and dumps. Throughout his colorful media career, he has promoted many sketchy crypto assets outright.

Read more: Andrew Tate may recover 21 seized bitcoin now worth 88% more

Andrew Tate says meme coins aren’t the crypto meta

In addition to claiming multi-million dollar profits to advertise his paid Discord server, Tate also claimed that the current bull run is not the current bull run.

Despite overwhelming evidence that meme coins are the current meta in crypto and outperforming every other category, Tate disagrees. Instead, he says that meme coins must surrender leadership to “genuinely technological useful or innovating blockchain coins.”

Like it or not, meme coins are definitely the current meta in crypto. Per Google Trends, search interest in meme coins has increased at least 600% in the last month and 50,000% in 12 months. The leading meme coin PEPE has rallied 4 million percent within 12 months. Solana’s blockchain went offline this week because so many users were launching meme coins and larger meme coins like DOGE, SHIB, and FLOKI have more than doubled.

Read more: Tucker Carlson mocks SBF during unhinged Andrew Tate interview

Tate, ignoring this evidence, claims that crypto’s next bull run will be different from the last one, which apparently had DeFi as its trendy meta. He asked his followers to guess at new blockchain innovations.

Even with criminal charges still pending, Tate is still claiming to be a trusted crypto expert. Indeed, not only does he claim to know more than Google about the fastest-growing topic in crypto, he claims that he made $85 million on Binance’s PancakeSwap.

Of course, PancakeSwap’s token is now down 91% from its all-time high. Tate’s trophy DEX has also lost $5.7 billion from its once-$7.8 billion ecosystem.

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Self-proclaimed misogynist and suspected human trafficker Andrew Tate has secured a minor win in Romanian court, opening the door for him to recover $10 million in assets — including 21 bitcoin confiscated by authorities last year.

On Monday, court documents revealed that the Bucharest Court of Appeals accepted Tate’s request to reassess the seizures, made in January and February 2023. An earlier request was denied.

This latest ruling means that the court must make a new decision on the $10 million in assets, which include luxury cars, property, and designer watches.

The 21 bitcoin included in the seized assets belong to both Tate and his brother, Tristan. Together with two Romanian women, the pair are accused of human trafficking, rape, and creating a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. The four vehemently deny the charges.

Read more: Tucker Carlson mocks SBF during unhinged Andrew Tate interview

Since the 21 bitcoin was seized by authorities in February 2023, its value has nearly doubled. Bitcoin has surged in price over the past few months, meaning that the seized digital assets have appreciated by 88% — from $560,000 to $980,000 at press time.

If Tate’s lawyers are successful in their appeal, authorities will have effectively acted as a highly secure wallet for his bitcoin to appreciate in. The influencer remains free but confined within Romania, periodically visited by police, while a court trial remains pending.

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Right-wing TV host and bow tie enthusiast Tucker Carlson says that controversial TikTok star Andrew Tate would have been branded a “hero” if he’d abandoned his social media-based endeavors and instead launched a fraudulent FTX-themed crypto or perpetrated a “massive financial crime.”

The comments — a clear dig at disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — came during an episode of Carlson’s Tucker on Twitter chat show on Wednesday. During the episode, Carlson and the disgraced former kickboxer discussed topics including Tate’s time in a Romanian jail, his conversion to Islam, and, predictably, ‘The Matrix.’

During the sometimes-unhinged two-and-a-half-hour upload, he also compared himself to men who died on the Titanic and described how he requested a woman outside the jail play him Is This Love by Whitesnake from her car.

Read more: Andrew Tate says he doesn’t endorse shitcoins but he definitely did

However, the controversial comments didn’t come from Tate alone. When delving into allegations of human trafficking against Tate and his alleged use of TikTok, Carlson said:

“Wouldn’t it just have been easier to commit a massive financial crime and defraud people of billions? Come up with a fake cryptocurrency, call it like, I don’t know, FTX? Or just give a name to it? Steal billions. Get your parents involved and buy a bunch of real estate in the Bahamas, and then like, you’d be sort of a hero, right?”

Tate responded, “I would certainly have a lot more money than with TikTok. I don’t know if TikTok even pays you for views, and if it does, I never got a single transaction from it.”

He also claims that had he been accused of a financial crime rather than human trafficking, rape, and organized crime, he would have been viewed in a much more favorable light.

Tate, his brother Tristan, and two other associates were arrested in December 2022 after a call was made to the US embassy in Romania, reporting that two women had been forced to create content for TikTok and OnlyFans. Tate has denied the claims.

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Controversial former world kickboxing champion and social media influencer Andrew Tate could see an estimated $560,000 in crypto seized by Romanian authorities after he was formally indicted on rape and trafficking charges.

Tate was arrested in Romania in December and remained in jail and under house arrest while under investigation. However, as detailed in a press release issued on Tuesday by the country’s Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism, he has now been officially charged.

Following this development, prosecutors have requested to seize assets and funds, including 15 high-end cars, 15 properties, a number of watches, and 21 bitcoin. It was initially reported that police had seized somewhere in the region of $380 million worth of bitcoin, but this turned out to be an error caused by a misunderstanding with Google Translate.

As reported by the BBC, Tate’s brother Tristan and two other associates have also been indicted on the same charges. The gang is accused of luring women into a sex work operation using fake promises of marriage.

Victims were allegedly “placed under constant surveillance,” forced into debt, and made to create pornographic material that would subsequently be shared online. One of the gang is also accused of two counts of rape in March 2022.

The Tate’s media team said, “While this news is undoubtedly predictable, we embrace the opportunity it presents to demonstrate their innocence and vindicate their reputation,” (via BBC).

A judge now has 60 days to consider the evidence and the trial is expected to last a number of years.

Tate has held more than just bitcoin

Back in May, Tate was forced to deny that he was hyping shitcoins. The disgraced kickboxer tweeted a ticker for a crypto token that launched just 15 minutes later.

The token, which boasted the ticker ‘SLUTS,’ initially pumped but quickly shed 99% of its value with Tate denying that he’d pumped the coin, instead claiming that he was “only joking.”

Read more: Why was crypto so quick to embrace Andrew Tate?

To make his stance even clearer, Tate then tweeted a video saying he doesn’t endorse shitcoin s and never will, however, this rang slightly hollow given that, back in 2021, he heavily hyped a dog meme token called Floki Inu.

Tate hyped Floki in late 2021, tweeting that he’d bought $100,000 of the currency and then replying with “Lets (sic) go Vikings, unlimited money awaits us in Valhalla.”

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On Monday, Andrew Tate, the infamous former kickboxing champion who is now facing charges in Romania for money laundering, organized crime, and human trafficking, tweeted a ticker for a crypto token that launched just 15 minutes later. In depressingly predictable fashion, it pumped.

The token, which boasted the ticker ‘SLUTS,’ has since shed 99% of its value and now has a market cap of up to $140,000. Tate denied that he’d pumped this coin and claimed that he was only joking.

Obviously wanting to make his ‘no-shitcoin’ stance clear, Tate tweeted again, this time a video saying he doesn’t endorse them and never will. And, just in case we missed that, he sent out another reminder today.

However, despite his vehement protests, there’s no escaping the fact that, back in 2021, he heavily hyped a dog meme token called Floki Inu.

An investigation by Altverse uploaded to YouTube shows that Tate promoted Floki heavily in late 2021. He tweeted that he’d bought $100,000 of Floki and then replied to his own tweet by saying, “Lets (sic) go Vikings, unlimited money awaits us in Valhalla.”

Read more: Measuring how much Elon Musk pumps crypto like Shiba Inu, Floki, Doge

In a video uploaded to YouTube on May 18 last year, Tate said that, once his Hustler’s University grows to 25,000 people, he’ll start using his students to manipulate markets and pump and dump coins. He claimed that the SEC wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because he lives in Romania.

In his career as a podcaster and influencer, Tate has earned tens of millions of Euros in bitcoin and Ethereum in payments for his “Hustlers University.” He also has a history of promoting bitcoin and ethereum and is well-integrated into the online crypto space.

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2022 and its seemingly neverending bear market wasn’t just a bad year for crypto prices, it was also a year to forget for a long list of frauds and heavily leveraged gamblers.

From the highly-publicized implosion of FTX and the arrest and arraignment of its curly-haired founder Sam Bankman-Fried to the SEC serving notices to crypto influencers like BitBoy (Ben Armstrong) and Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon fleeing to Serbia, 2022 will go down in crypto history as the year of reckoning.

But there could still be more to come. As 2022 was drawing to a close, news broke that infamous internet provocateur Andrew Tate had been arrested in Romania on charges of human trafficking, just days after he was involved in a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg.

Tate, for those who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of coming across him already, is a former world champion kickboxer and now online influencer who’s amassed millions of fans and followers by claiming to teach young men how to “stop being losers.”

Now better known for peddling online courses that promise to show how to ‘escape the Matrix,’ the cigar-smoking supercar enthusiast raised eyebrows when he boasted how he’d also set up a pornographic webcam business.

And, as if we couldn’t have already guessed, Tate also has a history of shilling crypto.

Andrew Tate has made influential crypto friends

Tate’s a pretty popular guy in the crypto world. In addition to having many fans in the space, he’s been interviewed – and in some cases even defended — by various popular influencers, including Anthony Pompliano and Laya Heilpern.

Indeed, back in December 2022, Altcoin Daily, a YouTube channel with more than one million subscribers applauded Tate for encouraging people to buy bitcoin and ether. Tate recommended people buy crypto now and sell just three years later with “retirement gains.”

Even Michael Saylor had amicable exchanges with Tate on Twitter with the pair casually applauding each other for holding bitcoin.

Read more: Crypto price predictions for 2022 were so off

Not only does he talk up digital currencies (or, at least the ones he holds), Tate also appears to use them to do business.

Recently, he’s taken to selling memberships for his ‘elite’ War Room (the self-styled ‘greatest global network which exists on planet Earth’). To join, you just need to pay around $5,500, and yes, it does accept bitcoin, apparently to multiple wallets.

Indeed, Protos identified one of Tate’s bitcoin addresses that receives membership funds for his club while others claim to have confirmed separate addresses that are allegedly used to rake in fees.

From the wallet identified by Protos, Tate received 113 bitcoin, worth around $2 million, and his ‘Hustlers University’ also collects bitcoin, netting around $11 million in just one month.

Of course, with crypto often comes illegal activity. Many of Tate’s courses have recently been promoted on Reddit, but when checking the shop’s bitcoin address Protos discovered that the seller is connected to a crypto scam that stole millions of dollars worth of crypto from Twitter users.

It should be noted, however, that Protos couldn’t find a direct link between Tate and the scammer who owns that particular bitcoin wallet.

Are Tate and crypto made for each other?

So, the question is, what exactly is the crypto community as a whole willing to put up with before somebody is unanimously cut adrift? Apparently, if the warm welcome extended to Tate and the number of supporters he still seems to have is anything to go by, as long as someone pumps bags, morality can take a back seat.

Of course, not all crypto-influencers welcomed him, and some, such as Peter McCormack, were publicly very critical. McCormack also took Laya Heilpern to task for her support of Tate. Sadly, the critical voices are more muted than those who’ve supported him so far. 

In a way, it’s no surprise that Tate has found such a firm following among the crypto community. After all, on the surface, they share many of the same ideals — an anarchic or libertarian ideology that’s against the state and is suspicious of official institutions. Indeed, Tate makes no secret of his dislike of the authorities and applauds countries like Romania where “corruption is accessible to everyone.”

Read more: Proud Boys ties to pro-crypto political consultant Samuel Armes

Ultimately, Tate didn’t become famous for his business success or his crypto: He became popular outside the kickboxing world by saying misogynistic and controversial things about women which have garnered him many male fans and followers. But despite this, when crypto and influencers discovered Tate and this army of fans, many crowded around him, praising him uncritically and feeding into the idea that he’s someone who should be listened to.

And this is a potential problem for Bitcoin or any other crypto with designs on total legitimacy. It’s no secret that Bitcoin has struggled to win acceptance from legislators and regulators alike, largely due to its anonymity features that make it particularly attractive to criminals and fraudsters.

And now, with images of one of its most famous advocates being led away in cuffs being beamed around the world, there’s not only egg on the faces of those who welcomed him so readily but more ammunition for those who wish to stamp it out.

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