Giveaway Event Livestream Crypto Scam

Scammer’s Number: N/A

Domains Used: - YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
(If you search “ETH news” and filter by Live, there’s so many of these!)

Extra Info: I can’t believe that YouTube allows stuff like this to remain up (there’s many examples of it if you search up “Ethereum event live” or “ETH news” and filter by Live for instance) and that they even recommend this (which is how I found it). There’s many versions with other popular crypto figures like Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Michael Saylor, etc and many different kinds of cryptocurrencies, not only Ethereum. It seems YouTube is doing very little to prevent it.

The scam is that they claim they’re doing a giveaway of Ethereum (or some other crypto). They have a fake livestream of a crypto figure like Vitalik Buterin or Elon Musk (usually from an old interview) to build credibility. They want you to send them the crypto to their address and they magically send you double the amount back (right). They even have a transaction log on the site to make it look legit that they’re actually sending people money back, but it’s a scam. Once you send crypto to someone, it’s gone forever. You can’t do a chargeback or anything. Although people who know crypto well will likely see through the bs, crypto newbies may fall for this scam, especially if they deal with memecoins like dogecoin or shiba inu where something like this may be possible in their mind.

Also, if you join legit Telegram crypto groups you will be constantly put into scam groups where they link to these sorts of things and use fake social proof (“WOW thank you it worked!!!”) from fake accounts to make it appear legit.

An interesting thing I noticed is that they use things like minecraft livestreams (currently on the last link I provided) to prep the live stream for their scam. Presumably, they do it to make it appear legit to YouTube or get around some kind of restrictions. Either way, I think YouTube should look into this and take action to stop it cause not only is it a scam but it also ruins the user experience.