YouTube Crypto Scams Are Increasing As Victims Lose Thousands

YouTube crypto scams are increasing as the victims lose thousands or even millions as the scammers found another medium to perpetuate their scams so let’s read more in our latest cryptocurrency news.

YouTube crypto scams are on the rise as the platform has been an effective marketing tool in the space which is why it is a prime target for scammers. Scammers found another way however to separate victims from their money and it was via compromised videos. Tenable reported that the rate of giveaway scams is on the rise with the giveaways being publicized in videos posted on legitimate YouTube channels which were compromised. Various YouTube channels were victims to scammers that hijacked their accounts to promote fake giveaways and in these giveaways, the scammers promised huge returns using the image of prominent people in the industry thus following the same pattern; the price of the coin starts to rise after influential people talk about it.

Scammers usually post videos of interviews with people like Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, and Michael Saylor and even attach fake tweets from their alleged Twitter profiles that promote a giveaway. Coupled with an increase in the price of an asset, these videos became the main trap for investors that placed a lot of importance on these voices. One example of this was Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk who appeared on the Saturday night Live show and speculations were that he will promote a meme coin which led the coin to surge in value. Scammers took advantage of the hype and hijacked accounts with millions of subscribers to launch their schemes and even made up to $10 million in BTC, ETH, and DOGE giveaways.

These scams prove to be effective for the scammers given the amount of money that was made off of them. Tenable reported that a Bitcoin wallet that has been used in one of the crypto scams involved hijacking Michael Saylor’s identity to promote a giveaway that promised to double Bitcoins sent to a particular wallet. The BTC wallet had 41 BTC in it when Tenable researcher Satnam Narang came across it but then this number grew to 132 BTC which was stolen in the crypto scam that totaled about $7.7 million at that time. In October, a huge chunk of these scams made away with almost $9 million that was stolen from the users. BTC accounted for most of the figure with over $8.2 million stolen in these scams. ETH had $413,983 stolen while scammers profited off SHIB with $239,346 stolen.