8 ms·

Fake SpaceX YouTube channel with 36k live viewers scams people out of money

• ajuc 6y ago
  It asks for bitcoins and promises to pay back (I assume it never happens). There's a lot of live viewers, probably many bots, but some real people too. It's high in youtube algorithm, I reported it obviously, but it will take a long time.
  • mfkp 6y ago
    I reported it as well, it's a sophisticated scam. Look at all the bots in the chat talking about how they got double bitcoins.
  • hckr_news 6y ago
    More bot viewers means more regular YouTube users who get their interest peaked by xthousand of “people” watching a live SpaceX broadcast.
• katmannthree 6y ago
  It always strikes me as odd how prevalent the bitcoin scams are on twitter. Virtually all of Elon Musk's tweets have a very prominently placed "BTC party" scam shown as a high-level reply. As an example, from his latest non-pinned tweet, the second visible reply is a BTC scam: https://i.imgur.com/ibO94uG.png https://i.imgur.com/ibO94uG.png How does twitter have such a high tolerance for this?
  • GhostVII 6y ago
    I don't use twitter often, but looking over the UI I don't see any ability to flag tweets - am I missing this or does it not exist in any visible place? Pretty much every other social media (Reddit, Youtube, Facebook) seems to have the ability to flag posts. That would make it much easier for them to identify and remove these kinds of replies. Combine that with no upvote/downvote system and people have no way of pushing down spam.
    • mfkp 6y ago
      Click on the caret (dropdown) at the top right of the tweet, then "Report Tweet".
  • vsareto 6y ago
    All I can think of when I see this is Jita 4-4 scammers from EVE Online and how it's basically the same playbook just with having to deal with getting new accounts.
  • nneonneo 6y ago
    To boot, I’ve often seen verified accounts (blue-checkmark) promoting these scams, which implies that the scammers have a stable of compromised accounts that they’re using for this activity.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    > How does twitter have such a high tolerance for this? There's absolutely no reason for them to care. These bots increase "growth" and "engagement" and are good for their user numbers. The damage these bots do doesn't seem to be enough for people to leave the platform and hit their bottom line. Nothing will change until we have proper regulation that will consider them complicit of such scams and fines them accordingly.
• alex_young 6y ago
  [video]
• temptemptemp111 6y ago
  Can't be worse than SpaceX itself, scamming people out of a lot more money. You actually think there's a car with tires full of air in space? "But but but they took the air out and" Wow...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• edw 6y ago
  Occasionally I fall asleep and awake to a channel like this, usually one showing science television content with an extremely active stream of real-time commenters. This gestalt of this channel is nearly identical. Has anyone written up an explanation of these vaguely (or not so vaguely) scammy YouTube channels? Or posted a YouTube video, more likely?
• oplav 6y ago
  Looks like that address in the video has about ~2.5 BTC received: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ELonMUSK14JSGNYAcPJNqubuFByZPyjcj https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ELonMUSK14JSGNYAcPJN...
  • richbradshaw 6y ago
    Is 4 now, only 30 minutes later...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• sxp 6y ago
  https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ELonMUSK14JSGNYAcPJNqubuFByZPyjcj https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ELonMUSK14JSGNYAcPJN... is the address the BTC was sent to. 2.5 BTC ~= $24k
  • ajuc 6y ago
    :/ 4.08663416 BTC already
  • solotronics 6y ago
    some of this might be the scammers seeding the address themselves so people see others sending to it?
    • ajuc 6y ago
      It also shows it haven't paid anything back, if somebody checks they won't fall for it anyway.
    • sxp 6y ago
      There are 0 BTC of outgoing transactions. A good Ponzi scammer would payout on small deposits so that the person is convinced to put in a bigger deposit. This was a popular Eve online scam and it was even more fun because the 'victim' sometimes managed to get a payout and exit the scam with a profit.
• thinkingkong 6y ago
  This scam has been repeated a couple of times. On the weekend they repeated an interview with Chamath Palihapitiya from 2-3 years ago and said it was a "Bitcoin Giveaway" where you got two for one bitcoin. It was hilarious but I never checked to see the transactions that had occurred against the target address.
• Aperocky 6y ago
  I've seen it because youtube algorithm recommended it to me.
  • qayxc 6y ago
    T H I S is the real issue here - YT actively promoting these scams to people, because they've replaced actual people with faulty algorithms...
• W-Stool 6y ago
  Who exactly falls for this kind of scam? I mean, "send us X and you'll get 2X in return" isn't too awfully different than those scams years ago for plans for a perpetual motion machine or the secrets to a 300 mpg car engine.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    I was thinking it sounds exactly like the Nigerian 419 scams.
  • som33 6y ago
    >Who exactly falls for this kind of scam? Uhh the same people who fall for the scam that was steam, uplay, mmo's, etc... aka it's irrational to buy software you don't own or control. If anything the modern software landscape is an idiocracy. Windows 10 "requires internet" (wtf?) I mean come on, anything that "requires interent" is a giant red flag. The steam stats prove we live in an idiocracy. Don't think so? Silicion valley tech companies are over the moon that the public bought into mmo's/drm/f2p mobile gambling games en mass. They finally are going to close the PC as an open platform, which started with merely renaming PC RPG's in the 90's and calling them "MMO's" then they started applying that fake moniker to every game they wanted to client server to steal them from the public to deny ownership. Whole industry is looking to setup the internte (aka the world comptuer) to trap software between the public pc's and their servers, so we get incomplete software in the future "requiring login" to remote servers (aka stolen software as a service). https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V... Steam software survey - windows 10 at 85% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... Windows 10 privacy invading, drm defective app model (uwp, encrypted vm's). Making preserving old software using UWP/encryption impossible (aka encrypted files). The average person in our society both working class and professional is dumb. I've talked to programmers who've bought overwatch or sent money to quake champions, not realizing that their mtx money told the industry to steal games and client server them. We used to get level editors in every AAA game in the 90's before the game industry and software industry discovered 70% of society is computer illiterate to an insane degree. The modern videogame and software landscape on the PC is an idiocracy, aka hardware dongled software by way of internet. So for people to fall for BTC scams on youtube when they fall for all kinds of "regular" corporate scams and are oblivious to the corruption of their own society for instance... is pretty par for the course. We live in a society of morons. See George carlin on the american dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
• mike_d 6y ago
  On the associated website they have this gem: > If the transaction does not process properly, please try by sending the same amount to the BTC address again, and it should go through. Your original transaction will be refunded as you can only participate once.
  • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    The Kenyon Review only pays $.05 per word, this definitely seems to be one of the better markets for fiction.
• dotJoel 6y ago
  They ran one with Oprah clips recently too.
• sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
  They hacked a large food channel that had 133k+ subs. When you go to the cumunity tab you can still see some of the original stuff still being there. (in case it gets removed to https://imgur.com/72nofl0.png https://imgur.com/72nofl0.png)
• u0a92 6y ago
  seems to be some russian guy who calls himself Maxim Sakulevich (from youtube's url https://www.youtube.com/user/MaximSakulevich/community https://www.youtube.com/user/MaximSakulevich/community which you'll get by clicking on the 'SpaceX' channel name and on community)... instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maxim_sakulevich/ https://www.instagram.com/maxim_sakulevich/ ... and some blog https://maximsakulevich.blogspot.com/ https://maximsakulevich.blogspot.com/ ... definitely a modern way of making/stealing money
  • detaro 6y ago
    That guy likely is a victim here: Channels get hacked and rebranded for those scams to get an initial subscriber base.
    • u0a92 6y ago
      Good point. So who should be responsible? Mr. Sakulevich/channel owners? Youtube/platform provider? Scammer (probably won't take responsibility)? Victims who fail for it? Educating all people (including channel owners and scammers) probably won't work/ won't be fast enough against fast paced internet technology and 'I want to use it now without effort' mentality.
      • anonymousab 6y ago
        Sometimes the channels are derelict - someone created the account, maybe to leave a comment, then never really used it again. Maybe you could argue that people should be responsible for shutting down unused accounts. I wouldn't agree but that's not unreasonable. But it is often the case that the owners of these accounts try to get access back from YouTube, to no avail. Several animators I subscribed to had their accounts hacked (maybe poor passwords) and filled with crypto scam nonsense and the process of getting them back was hopeless and took many months of concerted effort from them and their fans. At that point, though the scammers are of course primarily at fault, I'd also place blame on YouTube for allowing the scam-turned accounts to remain. Protection for user content that is sometimes illegal should cease when a host repeatedly fails to remove that (specific instance of) content in good faith.
• dawnerd 6y ago
  This same group has been taking over ton of channels. It's amazing Youtube hasn't found a way to detect it. Reporting it does nothing as some are STILL up months past reporting. Also interesting is these scammers are using fake viewers and fake chat messages to make it look more legit.
  • dandelany 6y ago
    Seems like it's exploiting a hole in YT's reporting process. I stumbled on a few of these streams last week and tried to report the accounts for "impersonating". However, on the reporting page, you're asked to specify which of the users' videos or comments are violating the rules, but you're not given any option to specify a live stream video. Since the accounts did not post any other videos or comments, there was no content for me to tag. I submitted the reports anyway and, shortly thereafter, got an email from Youtube telling me "Unfortunately the information you provided in your report to YouTube does not meet our impersonation reporting guidelines." Seems they automatically ignore any reports without tagged videos/comments.
    • ajuc 6y ago
      I just report as a scam.
    • dawnerd 6y ago
      YouTube/Google need to be more aggressive about blocking logins from new locations. The account owners don’t know until subscribers point it out.
• cbanek 6y ago
  I remember seeing this on youtube (maybe a week ago? same scam, same idea, I'm not sure if it was the same channel) and clicking on it and being like, this is a scam, but a well-targeted one. I was looking to see how it had anything to do with SpaceX and big surprise, that answer was nothing. Looking through my watch history I can't seem to find it though...
• bdcravens 6y ago
  I've seen this at least twice before - once with a Microsoft video, another with a Coinbase. (The Coinbase one was quite clever because early on, Coinbase would put a bonus amount in your account when you signed up, so the videos seemed to add a bit of validity). In each case, they use a channel with a lot of subscribers (not sure if they are hacks, or they purchase a channel)
• Nextgrid 6y ago
  The problem here is that there is absolutely zero incentive for YouTube to fix this. These bots still contribute to their "growth" and "engagement" and user numbers. Some of them might even be real users being paid to participate, which means YouTube is still showing them ads and profiting off them. We need proper regulations where platforms should be considered complicit of these scams when they fail to remove such content or outright promote it. As it stands, is is absolutely irresponsible from them to let any new account set up a livestream, boost its popularity with fake viewers and the algorithms will do the rest and start recommending it to real viewers.