We have all seen them or heard about them. You're on YouTube and you see a video that shows a live video of a cryptocurrency talk, usually featuring a well known person in the crypto sphere, a founder of a big project, CEO of an exchange or a crypto fund manager.
It says it is a giveaway due to some upcoming event or to raise awareness to get more people into the ecosystem, all you have to do to get free coins is to send some coins you already own and in return, you will get double back. You see there are a decent amount of viewers and the channel itself has a ton of subscribers, it has an official name and an official logo, so it is legit.
Except not really, these videos are scams designed to steal your funds. The videos are not live, they are replaying prerecorded events and if you transfer any coins then consider them gone, you will get nothing in return, so don't do it.
"But it looks so official! Here is my chance to get some free coins!" you might say. Well if you don't believe me, here are some things you can do to verify this yourself.
I happened to see one "hosted" two weeks ago by "Coinbase" and they were doing a giveaway due to a "Deal between Coinbase and Bitcoin", so I will use this as an example.
- Check the YouTube channel details
Open up the channels main page and view the page URL, at the end of the URL you will be able to see the channels true name. In this case, upon viewing the livestream for the first time, it would seem it was part of Coinbase. It had the name, the logo and close to 1M subscribers. But when I opened up the main channel page the URL showed the channel name to be "TopGaadi".
- Check their previous uploaded videos
Usually the videos uploaded prior to the "giveaway" have absolutely no relation to the channel name, or in some cases, all the previous videos have been wiped prior to the livestream going up. If they have been wiped, you could always put the URL into waybackmachine and see what they were if it has been archived. In this case, all the previous videos were car reviews, nothing to do with Coinbase or Bitcoin.
So what happened here?
Most likely the YouTube channel was hacked. The hacker used this as an opportunity to steal funds from anyone who sent them by posing as an official giveaway by a well known entity. The viewership on the video and subscriber count on the channel only helped them pretend to be legitimate. A scammer could have also done a deal with the YouTube channel provider, this probably didn't happen but I am not going to rule out that being a possibility either, when there is money on the line you never know what people will do.
When you see these videos please do NOT send any coins. You should instead report the video to YouTube so it can get taken down, as sometimes I have seen them stay up for quite a while.
