Hacker News Reader

Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Maybe worthy of its own post but there's another kind of overt scammer on Youtube. It goes like this:

They find some technically hip, well known content and create a new channel with a very similar name as the originator. Create an exciting full screen ad for a crypto currency faucet scam, with price charts and crawls. "Live" stream the original content inset into the ad.

Here's one example: https://cryptoplayboys.blogspot.com/2021/11/spacex-scam-live...

Even if you report these things, they don't get removed very quickly. They're getting tons of views so why would YT care? The original content holder would care about being associated with them and should sue for defamation though.

View on HN

>They find some technically hip, well known content and create a new channel with a very similar name as the originator. Create an exciting full screen ad for a crypto currency faucet scam, with price charts and crawls. "Live" stream the original content inset into the ad.

There's guaranteed to be several running after every Falcon 9/Starship launch, sometimes they'll attract almost as many viewers as the real livestream - very likely to be bots. What's even worse is that YouTube are recommending these, and with the removal of dislike counts it becomes even harder for the layperson to know if what they're watching is legitimate.

With the exception of copyrighted content it seems like YouTube find it acceptable to offer criminals a multiple hour head start on their mods, allowing them to stream any damn thing they like.

Those criminals and their potential victims (plus potential bots) "engage" with the platform. Until Google becomes liable for facilitating those scams, Google loses nothing and actually benefits from those scammers being there as they contribute to various engagement metrics. The same is true for any other engagement-driven company.

I am sure google would remove terrorism or child exploitation videos real fast, because they are compelled by law to do so. scam videos?..not so much.

Publish literally anything textual on the web and a moment later you'll find a dozen websites copying your content, raking in ad money, identity protected by Cloudflare and conveniently ranking high on Google.

Complain and people will all be "Freedom of speech! Go get a court order, it's not Google's or Cloudflare's place to censor content and/or decide what's copyright infrigement.".

Why is the YouTube drama any different from that? Is it because the creators are well known and have a platform and a following they can complain to?

The weird thing is who pays for all these ads and who take compulsive buy decision based on them ?

If we could someone boycott every company we see in these ads maybe they d stop?

I really dont think we should pay royalties in excess of cost of production + margin for future investment, and that copyright is an abuse itself after a few years of existence (hell I dont get paid a share of every revenue my work is contributing to and Im fine, I just create every day and if I dont like it Ill cut hair or clean dishes)

I find it incredible that if I search for [spacex] on YouTube during a launch, the official livestream doesn't appear in the first 20 results. Instead, it's all scams like what you described.

I wonder at what point Google's competence at search dropped to the point that they can't return the channel named "SpaceX" in response to my query.

During the Pixel 6 event last month I searched on YouTube for the live stream that would be starting in a few minutes and clicked the first result. The result had a Pixel 6 thumbnail, the live icon, Google in the channel name, the Google logo as the avatar, and around 30k viewers. I was a bit surprised someone was already talking on the stage and thought I tuned in late.

Well, after watching for 5 or 10 minutes, they kept talking about Pixel 5s, and then I realized it was a fake account streaming the event from the previous year.

I went back to YouTube search and tried a variety of queries for fun, such as "pixel 6 event", "pixel live", "pixel 6 stream", "pixel phone", and they all featured this fake stream as the first result. It continued to grow and was over 50k viewers. Further down the list was another stream with the same thumbnail, same avatar, and a similar channel name, and that happened to be the real one. It had around 120k viewers, so not much better than the fake channel.

After about 30 minutes or half way through the event, the fake stream was finally removed from the results.

I think their competence is fine, and the service works exactly as designed. The main problem is, Google is both publisher, search indexer, and advertisement network. Worse, it’s a near monopoly on all 3 of these markets.

When you search for SpaceX, Google has a choice.

They can optimize for search quality by taking you to their official channel which has no ads. Doing that only causes them expenses. Bandwidth and compute are very cheap at their scale, but not free.

Or they can take you to these heavily monetized third-parties with the same content. Because these copy-cats are monetized through the same google, google is taking a non-trivial cut from every advertisement dollar spent while people watching these videos.

They're getting tons of views so why would YT care?

You don't want your brand to be synonymous with scams. When that happens, you won't get any money from views - if people "know" the videos are scams, they won't watch. They'll assume all videos are scams and won't watch any original content. I'm sure the folks at Google can figure out at what point they need to take action. What amount of bad PR, percentage of views on scam content, percentage of content that is just scams, etc.

...Or maybe they aren't taking the long view on this.

That's clever, but won't most of the live stream viewers still be viewing on a legitimate platform? I'm guessing that framed stream doesn't actually have too many viewers.

I think in these cases, this kind of setup can be largely automated since there isn't really any unique/quality content that'd take a person time to create - and getting smaller view counts over many channels perhaps mitigates the risk of having the channel removed

I've seen similar with sport highlights searches, screenshots and automated commentary scraped from a news source. They don't get many views but there's hundreds of them, particularly for sport behind paywalls. No one wants to see them but they turn up in searches at the right time.

Must be demotivating for content creators to be continually dealing with this kind of thing.

these YouTube crypto scammers make so much money. About $30-50 million/month

https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/crypto-giveaway-sc...

to put it another way, that is about 2-3x times the revenue of the $20-million dollar YouTube copyright scam but compressed into just a few weeks to a month instead of 5 years.

I don't understand how so many people are willingly sending bitcoin. I could see a few folks that don't get how scams work. But millions daily?

That could be some "name squatting" / "cyber squatting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

Yes, it's a combination of name squatting, defamation, copyright, AND faucet scam. (bingo?)

YT should act on any one of these but they don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com