In only one week, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor discovered nearly 500 fake YouTube videos impersonating him.
Whale Alert is simply a Twitter bot that reports high-value on-chain transactions automatically. On Saturday, the bot spotted a transaction of 26 BTC to an address associated with a known scammer posing as MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor.
https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1482369659911483395?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1482369659911483395%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcryptocoin.news%2Fnews%2Fnew-wave-of-bitcoin-scammers-impersonating-microstrategy-ceo-michael-saylor-70245%2F
According to Whale Alert, the payment was most likely made through a Coinbase address. The real Michael Saylor wrote below the automatic message that there is now a surge of scammers impersonating him:
489 of these scams were launched on YouTube last week. We report them every 15 minutes and they are taken down after a few hours, but the scammers just launch more…
This is the single highest payment ever received to a bogus giveaway, according to scam-alert.io. This type of scam is described on the website as follows:
One of the most popular and effective type of scams in which the scammer promises to return multiple times the amount of cryptocurrency the victims send to them. Giveaways scammers will pretend to be a famous person or to represent a trusted company in order to gain the victim’s trust and are mostly active on Youtube, Telegram and Twitter.
According to a Google security analysis, hackers are aggressively attempting to steal YouTube channels traded on the black market and frequently wind up supporting crypto scams. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, for example, has a lengthy history of being impersonated by scammers.
YouTube was also sued in 2020 by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who felt that YouTube’s efforts to remove scam videos were insufficient. However, both lawsuits were dismissed.
A new and sophisticated sort of fraud has recently surfaced, advertising fake front-running bots on YouTube. In this case, the scammers dupe their victims into deploying and paying a smart contract that ostensibly performs front-running assaults but delivers all of its funds to the scammer’s address, which is buried in the contract code.
