Within the past 24 hours, not fewer than 30 top crypto YouTubers have reported that their accounts were hacked and fraudulent videos were uploaded to their channels.
The crypto YouTubers noticed that scammers uploaded a fraudulent video titled “one world cryptocurrency” on their YouTube channels.
The video promoted a fake cryptocurrency giveaway, asking unsuspecting people to send their USDT/USDC/BNB/ETH to receive a new crypto called “OWCY.”
Some of the YouTubers noticed the fraudulent videos within a few minutes and managed to delete them but the video posted on @Altcoinbuzzio’s channel already got over 2,600 views in an hour.
According to Mr. Whale, other hacked YouTube accounts include:
@IvanOnTech, @boxmining, @aantonop, @themooncarl, @Bitboy_Crypto, @mmcrypto, @FloydMayweather, @crypto_banter, and @CoinMarketCap.
According to BscScan, the broadcast giveaway scam didn’t cause so much harm as the scammers were only able to make a few coins out of the dubious move.
BscScan confirmed that only 2.3 BNB were transferred altogether to the wallet address displayed on the videos. At the time of this writing, the wallet address has only received a total of 10 transactions, which are worth only about $850.
How Did the Crypto Scammers Get In?
One of the victims, Michael Gu (@Boxmining), stated “Luckily we caught it within two mins of the video going live and managed to delete it (but) by that time there were already views and comments from my community.”
A Reddit post by “u/9Oh8m8” posited that the crypto scammers were able to gain access to their victims’ accounts using a SIM swap scam, which enabled them to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA).
However, @Boxmining wasn’t convinced that the hijackers used a SIM swap technique to hack his account.
He explained that there were no logins on his personal Google account. He said, “If it was a SIM swap, I would lose access to my phone etc. and that didn’t happen.”
Instead, @Boxmining believed that it “seems like YouTube might be responsible.”
He said, “What we noticed was on the BRAND account, there was a login from the Philippines. Very likely this is either a hack on the YouTube side or a rogue employee. That’s how they got so many people at the same time.”
He added that when he carried out an internal sweep on his account, he couldn’t find any bugs or viruses that might have given the hackers access to his account.
@Boxmining confirmed that “there are more than 30 accounts affected.”
For now, there isn’t any accurate information detailing how the scammers got into their victims’ accounts but we are glad that YouTube is working to fix the issue.
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