YouTube Fake Crypto Giveaways Explained - Behind The Account Hacks

Maybe you have noticed that there is a lot of fake Binance, Ethereum, Ripple and Bitcoin Cash streams on Youtube lately. The crazy part is that those live streams are on a big accounts with thousands of subscribers.

The scammer or group of scammers most likely from Russia started a new scam that is targeting YouTubers. They simply write you an offer to promote their platform on your youtube channel in the form of a preroll video.

They want you to download and try out their platform to see how it is and if you are interested. After clicking on the shady link it will take you to their website that is made in a 1:1 ratio with another website from a real company.

After downloading and running the program nothing will happen, but in the background, there is a program running.

What is the program doing?

1. Screenshot of your PC screen.
2. Text document with all information about your PC.
3. Text document with all passwords saved in your browser + copies your session ID.
4. Download cookies from your browser
5. Gets remote access to your computer without you noticing.

All that repeating every 5 seconds.

If they get access to your YouTube account they will just turn to rename the account to Binance or Binance announcements, hide all old videos, change profile picture and run a streaming loop with a fake giveaway in the description to scam people of money.

This happened to a lot of YouTubers lately. According to unofficial information, it could be over 50+ YouTubers with big fanbases.

Because of scammers are able to copy your browser session and cookies they are able to bypass Two-Step Verification.

Conclusion

Scammers will always look for new tricks and ways to scam people. Sometimes they use people’s naivety or carelessness. If you are a YouTuber be careful and don’t fall for such a cheap trick. It’s not always Binance, sometimes it’s Ethereum or Ripple, but in 90% of cases, it’s Binance.

On top of everything, YouTubers can lose their sensitive personal data if they hold them on their PC. One Czech YouTuber lost his ID to a scammer to find selling on the dark web 3 days later.

Among accounts that have been scammed are for example Roth Wellden that have over 300K subscribers, his account was broadcasting Binance fake giveaway for 3 days before his account was restored, but not everyone is lucky and some can’t restore their accounts.

Be careful, not only YouTubers but everyone because scammers are trying their best.

REAL STORIES BEHIND YouTube hacks

In this article, we will focus on a real examples of hacked YouTubers. If you want to read the previous article on how the scammers were able to steal those accounts click here.

Since my last article, a lot of you asked if this is truly real if those accounts are stolen from the real creators and the answer is YES… According to my observation in most of the cases, we can prove that there was a real person behind that account before.

GhostBlock - 589 000 (Article updated to add this story 10.01)

GhostBlock hacked!

GhostBlock is a famous YouTuber with a huge community and close to 60M views in total. He is doing animated Minecraft videos. Today (10.01) he was hacked and hackers instantly turned ON Binance fake giveaway to scam his community. There are even videos coming from his fans that are confused about what’s happening and who’s Binance CZ.

Man…your channel got hacked…

What heppend to your chanell😢

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR CHANNEL?!!

What Happen to GhostBlock?

Those are just few examples of comments by his confused community. Youtube needs to act fast and precise to stop hackers from taking an advantage of such a huge community.

2. MarcoStyle - 355 000 subscribers Account restored

Using Marco as an example we can truly unveil YouTube’s ignorance and slow approach towards creators that are operating on their platform. Marco got his account hacked and it took 2 weeks to restore it.

YouTube acknowledges the fact that his account was stolen since day one, but nothing happened to the hacker! He was freely using the account, streaming and scamming Marco’s community that he was building for years. On top of that, they kept the Marcos verified badge ON! Doing scammer a favor to look legit. Marco’s community was scammed of $15,000 in Ripple during the fake giveaway.

Eventually, Marcos got his account back after 2 weeks, but the fact that YouTube did nothing to protect his community during the hack is disgusting. Marco’s story was covered in Forbes.

3. RodiL - 327 000 subscribers

Rodil is Portugesse gamer, YouTuber and streamer. Three of His accounts were hacked over one week ago. Something that he was building for so long is lost now. He is desperately trying to reach youtube, but it seems like they are ignoring him and his community. Meanwhile the hacker aka. Brad Garlinghouse [Ripple CEO] is happily broadcasting scammy giveaway.

This is from RodiL’s twitter

Guys, I got robbed! RT THIS POST PLEASE
I lost access to my 3 channels, "Festinha do Rodil", "RodiL" and "Rodilzera".
When I go to any of these channels, ask me to create a channel from 0, with a new name. That is, they unlinked my channels to another email

4. Roth Wallden - 307 000 subscribers Account restored

The story was almost the same as in Marco’s case. Roth Wallden was hacked while downloading software from the scammy email. In his case, the account was held by the hackers for 3 days. According to him, YouTube has acknowledged the hack since day one but did nothing to stop the hacker streaming fake giveaway. Finally, thanks to his constant pressure on YouTube, big follower base and connections he was able to recover his account after 3 days.

Not only that his YouTube was stolen it was available on the black market for 0.45 BTC

5. Dollar Selmouni 179 000 Subscribers

Dollar Selmouni is a Hispanic musician with an official badge on YouTube. His account is still being held by hackers despite that it was hacked over 1 month ago! Broadcasting fake Ripple giveaways. Right now it seems like the hackers are not using this account to broadcast giveaways, but more likely it’s already on the black market waiting for the “new owner”. How is it possible? That verified musician by YouTube wasn’t able to recover his account?

6. BinNhiTV 165 000 subscribers

Group of people mainly kids from Philipines making songs for kids with over 42 000 000 of total views were hacked 5 months ago. The hacker didn’t even bother to delete the old videos. There is a big problem with YouTube that they are ignoring most of the hacks and by doing so they expose innocent communities to hackers.

7. GratakosYT - 128 000 subscribers

GratakosYT was doing games clips on youtube, but his account was lost to the scammers. GrakatosYT community is constantly reporting his hacked account trying to reach YouTube, but with no result so far. Is this bad staff? or just pure ignorance from YouTube? not caring about creators nor their community. It’s clear that the account is hacked yet they are not banning the stream in order to protect the Grakos community. He was forced to create the second channel and start all over again.

OTHER EXAMPLES OF HACKED ACCOUNTS

Thai gaming channel

Greek Basketball team

Malaysian music channel with over 10 000 000 total views

Russian YouTuber Katyusha

YouTube artist Savannah

YouTube educational channel

There are so many more examples, but it’s simply impossible to highlight them all. We can clearly see that YouTube is doing close to 0 to stop those hackers. Creators with a lot of subscribers might have a chance to recover their account thanks to publicity, however, when someone has less than 100K subscribers it seems like YouTube doesn’t even care.

For many of those smaller YouTubers its years and years of work and thanks to YouTube, it seems like they lost it all.

YouTube’s approach is weird and unprofessional allowing the scammers to stream their fake giveaways even when they acknowledge that the account was stolen. It looks like they are working with the hackers, not against them.

Let’s hope that thanks to bigger publicity YouTube will fix this mess soon.

Thank you for reading

Benjamin from DAO Makers