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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I saw that and reported it. The "Tesla" channel had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The name was actually "Tesla" like the real one.

You can invoke the algorithm's ire for even mentioning a concept that's not G rated, but if you steal the logo, video, and voice of a company to commit fraud, it's just fine. They really need to clean up.

PS - It seems channel names are not unique. That's a problem.

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Channel names are unique but the channel display name is not. If you click on the channel you will see that the channel name is "@TesIa-Musk" and its identifier is "UC4NV-QGBa5ZtMxAvc-xxSRw", which is an unique ID that persists channel name changes. Searching historical youtube metadata for that ID reveals that the channel used to contain some random Indian songs [0]

The youtube accounts used in these scams are typically from victims of info stealer malware that has compromised their google/youtube cookies and / or passwords. It is baffling how often these Tesla or Elon musk scams gain algorithmic traction and at worst it can take hours until they are deleted. At the very least they could add some warnings if the name of a high sub count channel was recently changed.

0: https://filmot.com/channel/UC4NV-QGBa5ZtMxAvc-xxSRw

Ah! That makes so much more sense if they're hijacking existing accounts that had existing algorithmic reputation.

It would be great if YouTube implemented something similar to community notes. Either that or show a warning on channels that share the same display name as a verified channel.

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