[zer01]

What you’re describing is a popular scam where a scammer rebroadcasts a previously run live stream with famous people and instructions to send crypto to an address for a “giveaway”. Since the livestreams are about crypto, people tune in and see a banner saying “send crypto here for a chance to win more crypto”, see a conversation that seems live with people they know, and fall for the scam.

These people you mentioned are not actually doing a giveaway, and YouTube is completely asleep at the wheel for combating these sorts of scams (they’ve been around for a couple years now, and automated detection is a harder engineering problem than scraping tweets).

The problem is that they’ve very lucrative for scammers since the scam is confusing enough for people that they think they’re credible, doubly so when they use hacked channels with changed names but have hundreds of thousands of followers to do the broadcast.

IMO YouTube absolutely needs to step up their game here - I’ve fought this sort of fraud at larger orgs and Twitter and Facebook both have pipelines established for security teams to escalate these things, meanwhile YouTube takes a report, let’s the scam run to its entirety, then picks up the pieces after the damage has already been done.

[johnwheeler]

That’s good info to know. Thank you. It’s stuff like this that gets people including myself into trouble falling for such scams. We don’t know what we don’t know.

[zer01]

Of course, happy to help!

The unfortunate reality is these scams are designed to be believable, and without there being similar sophistication on the part of Google to fight them they’ll remain effective :-/.

It’s definitely an issue though - the ability to transact near instantly in an immutable way cuts both ways, and adds jet fuel to an already thriving phishing and hacking economy. So I think crypto still has a while to go before it’s safe enough for normal people. Or maybe the space just becomes a layer between other layers and is more for finalizes settlement between institutions. Only time will tell :)

[loceng]

These scammers will also re-broadcast in real-time, real-time streams of SpaceX - within a wrapper with similar giveaway tactics.

That's how I was first exposed to them: I searched YouTube search for SpaceX live launch - can't remember exactly what I searched, and I believe they were first result or a top result anyhow. I clicked it and thought it was an official page for SpaceX.

It could even just be as simple as trying to promote/market Bitcoin to make people think it's more credible than it is by making it look like highly successful people are actively promoting it, etc.

[lotsofpulp]

I am confused why anyone would expect to get something in exchange for giving nothing.

[f0e4c2f7]

I've been seeing these especially on YouTube shorts and have considered saving them as well as reporting them. I wish I had one now to share as an example of what they look like.

I've also been seeing one where a deepfaked Elon (with AI generated Elon voice) encourages you to visit a crypto scam website.

[zer01]

Yeah there’s a lot of examples now a days unfortunately.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/10/crypto-giveaway-...

I work in the security/user trust space and it was amazing how it went from 1-2 scams like this and me going “huh that’s new and weirdly effective” to copycats springing up so often now that they seem to be a modus operandi for a lot of scam groups now.

Unfortunately they’re getting more sophisticated and usually coordinating with a large social media push (usually on Twitter via bots) and using hacked verified Twitter account and hacked YouTube channels with lots of followers to signal boost their scam.

Putting myself in Google’s shoes this is a hard game of cat & mouse, but they are also uniquely in the position to do something about it, and I’m positive their massive org can fight this better than they are today. Devils advocate being that they are making tweaks to things to stomp out this behavior and it’s just subtle enough that overall things are trending downwards and I just have selection bias since I’m looking for these scams.