Crypto scammers flooded YouTube with sham SpaceX Starship livestreams | Hacker News Reader

Crypto scammers flooded YouTube with sham SpaceX Starship livestreams

popsci.com

31 pointspaulpauper12 comments

While this is an article from March, this has been going on for multiple years.

For a short time I reported some of them as “supporting terrorism” or “promotes violence” to get them to a human reviewer faster. Occasionally they were acted on, but YouTube has allowed these easy to find streams to flourish. YouTube even allows for the accounts to use “SpaceX” as the channel name.

Happened to Linus Tech Tips last year.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/23/23653115/linus-tech-tips-...

Imagine how many reports Trump-related videos get . Or anything political. The threshold for a report actually triggering a review or take-down action must be very high. So useless. Even if was pulled down, a new one would show up. The scam is just too profitable and you tubetoo slow. Hence it endures forever.

This isnt new. Scammers been doing this to musk's streams for years.

Yeah, this has been going on for years. The typical pattern is for an attacker to gain access to an established YouTube channel, change its profile name and image to SpaceX, delete all previously uploaded videos, and start broadcasting a scam stream until it gets taken down.

The fact that you can do that on YT without triggering a thousand alerts and extra account validation is just stupid. They could cut down that scam significantly, but... YT doesn't care.

One or two years ago I accidentally watched one of these for a live SpaceX launch, when it came up at the top on Roku's search. They switched over to an ad five seconds before liftoff.

These ppl make so much $ it's nuts. An address with something like only .2 btc is 14k. By the time youtube removes the video the scam already profited. Repeat everyday 24-7.

>..to send either 0.1 Bitcoin or one Ethereum or Dogecoin to the specified address. After completing the transaction within a minute, twice as much Bitcoin or Ethereum will be returned to your address...

It's not even a sophisticated scam. How long have crypto scams being going on and why do people still fall for the same ones? The human brain really does seem to have a "get free stuff" logic override mode.

At the very least they could offer to trim armour at the same time.

Reminds me EVE Online most basic scam: "Quitting EVE, send ISK and I will send back double". Often times increasing multiplier if you send big sum.

I always wondered how many people can fall for it, but given how prevalent the scam was (chat in main trading star system was 50% this scam back in days), I assume non-zero.

I guess it targets new players, but they have the least amount of ISK to be robbed off, I am still surprised it was/is worth the effort.

Yes. Somehow people trust Elon musk. Amazing eh?

Its hilarous, some people fear AI takeover and at the same time scam streams and twitter accounts that are hilarousily easy identify as scams stay up.

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