Will the fake Musk livestream scam on YouTube end?
all weekend, enjet According to YouTube reports, Elon Musk spoke at a Tesla conference-type event. According to Engadget, the live broadcast once had more than 30,000 viewers.
Problem one: It’s not true. This fake live event is part of an ongoing cryptocurrency scam on YouTube.
Fake Musk livestreams continue to flourish on YouTube
The scammers involved in this particular scheme appear to be solely focused on YouTube to perpetrate their scams.
The idea behind it is simple. Scammers are live-streaming videos of Elon Musk speaking at certain events. Typically, these broadcasts feature actual footage of Musk on a loop. The audio can be an AI-generated fake voice that sounds like Musk, or it can be real audio from Musk speaking, which is general enough to be anything.
Mix and match speed of light
However, on-screen graphics depicted the event as a live lecture from Musk about cryptocurrencies. These often include links or QR codes to crypto scams, urging viewers to seize the opportunity before the live broadcast ends.
There is another key element to this scam. These live videos are often streamed on hijacked YouTube channels that people have subscribed to. These hacked channels may have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, so YouTube notifies the built-in audience that the channel these users subscribed to has just gone “live.” Scammers often change the name of a YouTube channel to look like an official account related to Musk or Tesla.
In this particular case over the weekend, the hacked channel had over 10,000 subscribers and was verified by YouTube. The channel has been renamed “Tesla” and the YouTube handle is “@elon.teslastream.”
While Engadget had as many as 30,000 live viewers at one point watching the live broadcast, it’s unclear how many of those people were real people. YouTube often promotes and recommends live streams based on the number of users currently watching them. It’s possible that a large portion of these viewers were bots, designed to trick the YouTube algorithm into pushing videos into users’ feeds.
While Musk and Tesla are most commonly used to drive these YouTube live crypto scams, scammers sometimes change their tactics slightly. For example, in April, Mashable report The SpaceX version of this scam weaponized Eclipse in order to perpetuate their crypto project on YouTube.
About four years ago, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak actually be accused His likeness was used in a Bitcoin scam livestream on YouTube. So, this has obviously been going on for a while. Unfortunately, it looks like these fake YouTube live streaming schemes are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
