YouTube’s failure to tackle Elon Musk’s network of streaming fake videos has drawn criticism from all quarters. Cybercriminals these days are hijacking YouTube accounts and using videos to promote cheap cryptocurrencies.
According to BBC News, millions of people are watching these fake streams. Earlier on Tuesday, Elon Musk said that YouTube is not dealing with these scam ads. Although YouTube says it removes the reported channels. He said that for the past several months, criminals have been asking people to send cryptocurrency through fake streaming and fooling them into thinking that they will get a reward from Elon Musk.
Let us tell you that with the help of a link on the website https://elon-x2.live/ the criminals are asking people to send bitcoin or Ethereum to the digital-wallet address and are claiming to double their amount. Scammers have collected $243,000 through the wallet in just one week. According to the report, hackers change the names and images of dozens of YouTube channels every few days to make them look like the official Tesla channel.
Chilean urban-music artist Isaac says that two weeks ago his YouTube channel was hacked. After this his followers on other social networks started asking me what happened with the name of his channel, they were very confused as to why I was streaming Tesla content from my channel. He said that It is very disappointing that after working for so many years my YouTube channel got hacked. I feel completely insecure. The hacking of my channel has hurt me a lot because I was about to release a new music video. Now I’m creating a second channel as a backup and re-uploading my over 10 years of work to YouTube’.
YouTube said it had removed one of the channels that BBC News alerted it. The company said that their community guidelines are very strict and prohibit any scam. This also includes hacking. Whale Alert founder Frank van Weert said scammers are having little success this year, but they are still making millions if the price of bitcoin goes up. He said that the number of scam cases is decreasing as compared to 2011, but still many people are falling prey to it. Hackers are finding new ways to trap them. Such cryptocurrency exchanges can prevent stolen coins from being cashed.
