Recently, tens of YouTube accounts were hacked to broadcast a Ponzi cryptocurrency scheme by renaming the hacked YouTube accounts as Microsoft accounts bearing the message from the company's former CEO Bill Gates to invest in crypto.
This is not the only attack of it's kind, various other attacks like this have become frequent on YouTube where the hacker hijacks a popular account and broadcast a message from the account- a "crypto giveaway", where the user is offered that if they give some cryptocurrency they'll get it back doubled. And of course, this is a scam and the victim does not get any returns.
These frauds first made their appearance on Twitter but moved on to YouTube as Twitter started weeding these posers out.
These hackers very efficiently gave their scheme an air of legitimacy by live streaming (on 30+ accounts) one of Bill Gates talk given to an audience at Village Global in June 2019 and adding a pop of messages of the Ponzi Scheme. This Ponzi scheme was live streaming on these accounts on YouTube- Microsoft US, Microsoft Europe, Microsoft News, and others.
Though both YouTube and Microsoft denied that any official accounts were hacked some users did report that they found the stream on Microsoft's nonverified accounts.
Most of the scam videos were streaming from hacked accounts with high subscriber numbers, that were renamed as Microsoft US, Microsoft Europe and such to seem more official. The viewed number of the videos was in tens and thousands, also the Bitcoin address in the scheme received thousands of US dollars thus successfully scamming some users.
Various other organizations have been used by such hackers like Chaos Computer Club, a famous Germany-based hacking community, had their accounts hacked and broadcasted with a similar cryptocurrency scheme.
The most recent and popular case was when the YouTube account of YouTube's founder was hacked back in January. So, these sorts of fraudulent schemes have now become a common affair and it's at the hands of the users not to pay heed to these. Always check the legitimacy of these accounts and it's good to remember to think twice before giving in to an offer that's too good to be real.
