YouTube scams: Fake Elon Musk live streams continue, fraudsters made $243,000 in a week
Premium- YouTube Elon Musk scam: The fraudsters are hijacking YouTube accounts and using fake videos to promote bogus cryptocurrency giveaways
Have you ever come across a YouTube Livestream that says Elon Musk's bitcoin price prediction or his viewpoint on cryptocurrencies. If yes? Then you have also been the target of cybercriminals.
A whole network of cyber criminals has surfaced which are streaming fake Elon Musk videos to scam viewers.
The fraudsters are hijacking YouTube accounts and using fake videos to promote bogus cryptocurrency giveaways.
According to BBC news, thousands of people viewed these fake live streams this month. And as per the news website, scammers made $243,000 in a week. "23 transfers of bitcoin totalling 7.68923261 coins worth $234,000. 18 transfers of Ethereum totalling 5.016 coins worth $9,000," it added.
Recently, the Tesla CEO said YouTube was not tackling "scam ads". But YouTube said it has removed channels that are reported.
For many months, the live streams have been fooling thousands of people into sending cryptocurrency to criminals.
According to BBC, the hackers change the name and picture of dozens of YouTube channels to make them look like official Tesla channels of which Musk is the chief executive.
Recently, a foreign music artist's YouTube channel got hacked. He told BBC that his followers were asking why was he streaming Tesla's content.
"My followers on other social networks started asking me what is going on with the name of my channel and were very confused about why I was streaming Tesla content," he said.
"It is very frustrating that your YouTube channel is hacked after dedicating so many years of work to it," the music artist said.
Last year, one man hoping to double his money sent scammers $400,000 worth of bitcoins, after seeing a fake advertisement on Twitter.