A few weeks ago, Logan Paul did me right. He announced on Twitter that he’s suing Eddie Ibanez, his grifter ex-business partner, and the source for Paul’s lawsuit is my investigative reporting. I’ll take that win. But Ibanez won’t take the L. Because now he is using his daughters to scam Taylor Swift and her fans. Despite his history of fraud, his ex-wife, Fox News anchor Jackie Ibanez, continues to allow Eddie to interact with their children, who he continues to use as a front for his cons.
In between the time my story was published in February 2022, and Paul’s 2024 lawsuit, Ibanez has gotten busy working a new NFT grift scamming Taylor Swift fans. Worse, he’s fronting the scam with his two young daughters who he shares with Jackie. Their divorce was finalized in 2021, but Jackie kept his name and she and Eddie have continued to raise their children together.
First some backstory:
In June 2018, Jackie visited Eddie at his Westport office, and whatever happened when she confronted him that afternoon, the encounter ended in her arrest.
After that, Jackie took a leave of absence from Fox News, but continued to stand by her man. She joined Eddie on a trip to Hong Kong later that year which he claimed was a play to acquire Forbes magazine from the Chinese. Following her return, but before she returned on air at Fox News, Jackie spent her downtime on the road as a paid influencer for Hotelafly, one of Eddie’s ill conceived travel booking sites. (In a recent Fox News segment, Jackie said her dream job, outside of Fox News, would be traveling the world reviewing five star hotels.)
While Jackie was off promoting Hotelafly in early 2019, Eddie was accused of committing sexual assault back home.
On February 15, 2019, a Wall Street law firm sent Ibanez a 7-page settlement offer detailing sexual assault allegations made by a former employee. The document, delivered to Ibanez’s Connecticut office via certified mail, described weeks of alleged sexual abuse and inappropriate behavior instigated by a “suicidal” Ibanez, and his fellow executives and childhood friends, in New York, Connecticut, and California, all of which the woman claimed she suffered during her brief employment before she was terminated on January 22, 2019.
While this alleged sexual assault transpired years before the Ibanezes’ divorce was finalized, Eddie continued to spend time with his children, and tried to win their favor by unwittingly and publicly incorporating them into multiple fraudulent schemes including the ongoing CryptoZoo lawsuit.
Last spring, Ibanez launched a company called Slay Gum. Slay was his company. However, the Slay website claimed the company was founded by his two girls. Slay’s About page showed as much. (I’ve hidden the Ibanez girls’ identities throughout this story.)
At first, Slay was a new way for Ibanez to sell a new brand of “Dreepo” NFTs linked to LifeRewards, a travel booking site strikingly similar to Hotelafly, which Ibanez launched in October 2022, in the thick of the CryptoZoo backlash.
These Dreepo NFTs were also randomly inserted into packages of the girl-powered Slay gum Ibanez used his daughters to front.
Last June, Ibanez hosted a launch party for LifeRewards at Hinoki in Greenwich, CT.
It’s a failing of local journalism that not only did no one in attendance know Ibanez had been accused of fraud, he even had a media partner. The event was sponsored by Westport Lifestyle, Greenwich Lifestyle, and Darien Lifestyle magazines.
The Ibanezes’ daughters attended the party and promoted Slay. That very same night, a process server showed up and served Eddie on behalf of CryptoZoo plaintiffs.
For no obvious reason related to its NFT/gum business, Slay’s product line soon expanded to include counterfeit Taylor Swift merch.
I never thought I would identify as a Swiftie, but I enjoy her music, and watching Fox News attack the pop star for no good reason, I couldn’t stand to see a Fox News family profit off Taylor’s fans like this.
Because it gets worse. Not content with making fake Slay Gum Taylor merch, Ibanez is now trying to juice LifeRewards’ Instagram follower count. He’s offering a free trip to a Taylor Swift concert to anyone who tags three friends in this post and follows the LifeRewards account. The LifeRewards account now has over 10,000 followers.
He tried the same thing before the Super Bowl last year, using LifeRewards to offer one couple $1000 if the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl. If you didn’t know, one reason Ibanez was exposed as a con artist was because he falsely claimed he masterminded the Eagles’ previous Super Bowl win.
And if you think LifeRewards is niche, that the mainstream media could never buy into Ibanez’s scams after so many scandals, you’d be wrong. After the Eagles post, LifeRewards bought sponsored content in partnership with Skift, and a few months later, in March 2023, travel writer Jacob Passy quoted Ibanez in the Wall Street Journal and in doing so validated Ibanez as an expert authority in the travel tech space. By then, Ibanez had been outed as a con artist for more than a year.
It’s one thing for Ibanez to tell readers to use his site instead of Google, but I’m shocked Jacob Passy sourced Ibanez for his story without Googling him first.
Want to know what Eddie Ibanez was doing before CryptoZoo? Read how he tried and failed to scam Ja Rule and real estate developer Nile Niami in the days before his divorce was finalized.