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When it comes to crypto scams, forget about romance, the dark web, or even scam trading platforms. According to a new report, YouTube is a go-to tool for those looking to set up digital currency schemes and steal money from unsuspecting victims.
YouTube Becomes A Heaven for Crypto Scams
The report comes from With Secure Inc., a digital security firm that has been monitoring a network of crypto-fraudulent schemes that are thriving via video platforms such as YouTube. The big problem with this is that many of the videos from these scam platforms appear legitimate at first. They all seem to be engaged by the sheer volume of likes and comments they seem to be receiving. However, it is thought that all of this is fake and designed to make the video look more real.
Overall, these videos are most likely operated under the same deceptive network, which With Secure believes consists of around 30 people at the time of writing. Many of them use applications like Telegram to communicate and/or carry out their operations.
In a statement, With Secure intelligence researcher Andy Patel said:
This network seems to be targeting existing cryptocurrency investors with low quality videos in multiple languages without localizing them to reach different territories, so I think this is a pretty opportunistic approach. Usually, this results in a large volume of small transactions, but as the volume increases, so does the chance that they will get lucky and find someone who is able and willing to invest a larger amount.
It is recommended that the group in question has copied and pasted comments from other YouTube videos into their own so that they look more real. All of these videos recommend scam-based apps and other platforms that thieves control to collect funds from people who are unaware they are being conned. Many of these schemes are centered around the digital currency Tether, which is a popular stable coin.
The good news is that the scam doesn’t appear to have made much money at the time of writing, although Patel does mention they are slick in how they make themselves visible to others. He says:
I don’t believe this particular scam is so profitable. However, they clearly know how to game YouTube’s recommendation algorithm using a hands-on approach. Moderating social media content is a huge challenge for platforms, but the successful amplification of content using simple and well-known techniques makes me think that more can be done to protect people from these scams.
Steal More Money
Once someone is tricked by one of the videos, they are asked to transfer money from their own crypto wallet to a separate platform, which cyber criminals obviously do.
Between 2021 and 2022, more than $1 billion in crypto was lost due to social media scams.
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