There is a scam on Youtube that is spreading like a lab-leak from Wuhan…..talk about viral!! There are now 3 variants that I am seeing....all with the same basic structure and message.
It's an advertisement which is a deep-fake video of Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, Elon Musk from Twitter and most recently Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana labs. In the video, the personality basically tells an almost believable story (if you're a crypto virgin) about how they will reward you through a great giveaway. For example in the COINBASE video, Brian says that they have done a deal with the FTX estate to purchase their entire holding of Solana and that due to the recent price moves, this has been a very profitable deal. It's almost believable to this point, but then he says that Coinbase wants to share this with their loyal customers and so to participate you need to send some SOL to the address he provides and you will receive double your SOL back as a thank you....that old chestnut! It's an old horse that he is flogging but the AI powered upgrade it has had almost saves the old nag from the glue factory. Apart from the content itself, there are some small tells that the video is a deep-fake. On a few occasions, the voice inflection is a little wrong and there is a minor mistake in the English at one point where he refers to himself in the third person. A native English speaker would never make such a mistake so I am guessing this has been cycled out of a lab somewhere in Pyongyang or the troll farms of Leningrad.
Overall though the technical achievements of these videos are impressive and I am somewhat amazed at the state of the art. I don't think it will be long before this type of content is truly indistinguishable from the real deal. I imagine it must be driving a pretty good return for the authors since I have been served this video at least 20 times in the last 2 weeks even though I continually block it.
There are other versions of this video with Toly from Solana similarly promising a giveaway to loyal Solana supporters and one from Elon Musk telling you that you are 1 of only 45 people receiving this message which could help you to change your life. I have reported these ads on multiple occasions to Youtube as fraudulent scammy content but usually they come back and say that after reviewing, they found nothing wrong with the ad and that it doesn't break any guidelines! I am sure that this is just an AI-generated automatic response (in this crazy BRAVE new world the AIs are policing the AIs!). When I have appealed against the decision and basically laid out point by point why it’s fraudulent….how it's impersonating a real person, trying to cheat people out of their crypto and potentially bringing a reputable organisation into disrepute and therefore creating a legal liability for YouTube....only then do they agree and take the ad down. The only problem is that there are many other variants of the ad and it will be served to me again in a few days, with a different ad reference number. It's all very well organised and quite suspicious. Are YouTube just happy to let it run to get the advertising dollars or is there something more sinister afoot here? Are they trying to make people lose money to crytpo scams so that there can be greater grounds to take harsh regulatory action against it. Isn't that after all what FTX was all about? These people were all mates of Gensler and Warren until they weren't!
Anyway, I am sure that this turdy scam will metastasise into some other version so just block this sh*t whenever it is served to you. Complain about the ad and appeal when Yotube do nothing and most of all don't send these crooks any of your precious crypto!!
Stay safe people!
