YouTube STILL Has This Problem - The Shadow Economy

foreign today's video is a continuation in a sense of a topic I've long been advocating about which is what I call the YouTube Shadow economy now that may sound extremely dramatic or hyperbolic but let me explain just a little bit further at least six times over the span of four years I've talked about targeted efforts to compromise YouTube channels and sell them on the dark web

actually there's a bunch of marketplaces on the clear web as well but those aren't the real ones those are like the knockoff versions they do what they say they will and they work more on that later on in the video but they're not the actual main scary ones the main scary ones hidden in the dark recessed corners of the internet are what I call the YouTube

Shadow economy and today once again but with new information to add this time I want to talk about what that is how it works why it's scary and warn creators as well as make an attempt at forcing YouTube's hand in an effort to fix the actual problems warn creators about the latest example of targeted and fairly clever methods this time being used to hijack their careers

without further Ado let's dive in the original version of this Shadow economy the first version I was made aware of at the very least goes back to 2019 when a friend of the channel named Marco style had his accounts compromised this was a pretty straightforward example but it's also the easiest to describe Marco's style was spearfished so it's called by an email from a potential sponsor

obviously a fraudulent or fake sponsor that was impersonating a real brand or something like that that tricked him into downloading a malicious program which copied his browser instance including cookies and circumvented a two-factor authentication on his YouTube account his Google account rather it's a bit more complicated than that honestly but that's the gist of it after being compromised his channel was stripped rebranded and resold on

what I think if I remember correctly right now again it's been a few years it was a russian-based web forum for like 900-ish dollars after that it started to launch crypto live stream scams while impersonating someone named Brad garlinghouse the CEO of Ripple which were successful and we can trace that because it's blockchain and we had the wallet address which were successful to the tune of

again if I remember correctly like 30 000 or more maybe it was thirty six thousand dollars at the time that I made the video which was taken presumably as per the broadcast running from Marco Styles own pre-cultivated audience that's unfortunate but it's also not exactly isolated that same crypto live stream scam was running on dozens of other channels simultaneously cycling up on new carriers as the

accounts were terminated and being fed into additional compromised YouTube channels daily to prey on their followers really not good well to their credit YouTube has done something about that particular version of the scam largely removing it from the platform but no not really because if we search for ripple right now as I make this four years later iteration of the video and filter by live streams

we find things like Ripple xrp case reaching a happy end SEC lose Brad garlinghouse live streaming to thousands of viewers on a channel called SpaceX of all things there's more just like it such as this one from a channel called Ripple with over 14 million subscribers it says or this one from a channel called Ripple again again with 1.3 million subscribers and suffice it to say

it's not an isolated problem these live streams have QR codes and the site that they lead to is a relatively unindexed phishing site as of right now called x2ripple.com as per virustotal only one provider has actually flagged this particular domain X2 ripple.com because it's a doubling scam they say send us a certain amount of crypto and we'll send you twice as much back that's how the

scam functions through fomo I'll address that in a second but again that's why it focuses on the idea of doubling your money now you'll notice the video is not in fact sponsored and that's because it's effectively sponsored by upper echelon itself I'm starting to use affiliate products now instead of the more traditional in-video sponsored segments which I guess looking at the affiliate attraction might not have

been worth it for me ever to do and a couple of those affiliate Partnerships are ESET and guardio ESET is a cyber security program for all your devices and guardio is a threat prevention Chrome extension whereas most people use the Chrome browser and remember their own passwords in Chrome which is a death sentence don't do it and both of these Services flagged the urlx2ripple.com as suspicious

and I have some more content in the future about that where I'll showcase the results from a phishinglink database in real time which I hope will be informative since I conduct my own due diligence package for all sponsors and channel Partners long story short I know people are probably sick of hearing about that part there are two links down below two of the best products that

we could find that protect you from not only this particular type of threat but many more types of threats these are Services I trust and they do cost a bit of money it does benefit the channel if or when you buy them but I also stand by these choices wholeheartedly and I've been able to witness precisely what value they provide in real time they don't protect

against everything no service ever can but for people that want some basic hands-off help and rudimentary protection just for a fee these programs are an excellent place to start anyway if you're interested in that or a much larger list of overall products services and discounts that can Harden your cyber security there's a link tree down below Below in the description with a curated selection chosen by

myself and a couple of expert sources who are helping me with a few of these video topics back on task the sad reality is that every time YouTube clamps down on these scam Rings another one spins up every single time every time a Creator is compromised the scammers get fresh victims hundreds of thousands even millions of potential victims all at once packaged all nice and perfect

into a centralized Hub where they can promote the scam and if you just search for basically anything to do with crypto Tesla or Elon Musk you'll find them in droves here's a basic search for Tesla that I just conducted just now where multiple of the first page results are streams to thousands of live viewers with a QR code fishing link embedded right in the broadcast this

one is also relatively unindexed as well because whenever the URLs start to get Mass flagged the scammers just pack up shop and move on they have fresh ones waiting to spin up all the time an army of bought traffic to direct wherever they choose and bolster credibility through crowd mentality and the problem is actually larger now than even one was in 2019 I know that YouTube

maybe tries to do something here but obviously they need to make some adjustments because it's clearly not working for those curious the issue of bonded traffic is only getting worse right now especially on pretty much every social media platform because of the previously mentioned psychological phenomenon known as crowd or herd mentality crowd mentality is one of the primary driving forces behind Market speculation bubbles which has

been an industry standard method of targeting YouTube viewers for quite some time it's kind of a show all of these substructure scam Rings which are basically all based on each other in iterations use crowd mentality to boost the efficacy of the crypto scheme by spiking the engagement metrics of the urgency-driven live broadcast where you can double your money for a short period of time a large

group of people watching so it must be real or it would have been shut down already is what the obedient and trusting viewers tend to think and I don't have much time I have to act fast and get the money is what the gullible and kind kind of fear-driven viewers think making this the perfect combination of urgency and Authority factors to increase the hit rate of

the scam again for creators I have an entire list of techniques and products down below that we will be evolving over time to prevent you from ever being a victim of the YouTube Shadow economy and also if you need to think about it this way you need to be taking precautions because you should not be risking that kind of impact on your own fans and audience

you aren't just protecting yourself here though you are protecting yourself you're protecting everyone that watches you and that actually is your responsibility in this case however you do it is fine I'm not here to say one method is better than another but you need to be doing it I'm speaking to YouTubers right now you have to take precautions to protect not only yourself but your audience

from this type of scheme here's the thing I've talked about all of this before multiple times and hopefully these kinds of videos bring attention to the issue and help the streams get taken down actually I know that's true already going back to some of the older videos the channels that were compromised have been either reinstated or full on deleted so results they do happen in a

proverbial game of whack-a-mole I guess yay still a fight that seems futile can still be a fight worth chasing in some circumstances so now we get to discuss the second half which is the evolving techniques through which the shadow economy can compromise targeted channels in the hierarchy of cyber threats if you will there are some things that you can protect against and other things that you

can't protect against over the years I've learned a fair bit about this type of scam being that it's targeted me in particular multiple separate times and as proof of that I have browsed the dark web portals where hackers for hire offer their services I have visited the YouTube Shadow economy marketplaces the big ones I've even bought a couple of accounts from the clear web counterparts of

the more intense or Insidious vendors and I've observed how botnet traffic is used to bolster compromised accounts on multiple different social media platforms and turn them into scam pushing super hubs it's fascinating stuff it really is but sticking to my original topic here I want to focus on how they compromise in particular YouTube channels there's a a few different tactics such as spearfishing a Creator by

impersonating a sponsor that's a super common one and has been for years and it's worked many times in the past or sending a false copyright claim email and attempting to infect the victim through a compromised download in the PDF file but the most recent version is actually a whole lot simpler and really it's insidiously clever for starters when a scammer impersonates an email from an official

Source whatever that official Source might be there are always always clues for a large YouTube channel owner it's actually pretty easy to detect or should be based on our prior experiences but most recently over five times in the past couple days alone I've started to get a different type of email recently I've been getting kind of spammed by these which are private videos being shared notifications

that actually do come direct from YouTube's own system see for scammers it's all about piggybacking on the authority of something else to get you to trust them and YouTube itself is a great way to prey on the false trust or in some cases fear that we as his creators have with regards to anything about monetization or copyright no reply at youtube.com is the actual email address

being used as they simply share a private video to my email address that they got from my videos and like I said it's really insidiously clever because all they have to do is put the malware in the description of the video and then share it and then delete it after a short period of time these emails that they send out very quickly end up leading to

Dead End videos or terminated channels but the hilarious thing is that YouTube doesn't even have a proper option to report them see you can't report the video because after they send it out they quickly remove the content anyway they're looking for Rapid hits right they send it out they want to hit and then they delete it they're not really giving themselves time to be found out

and deleted and you can't exactly report the channel itself because the option doesn't exist here's what I mean this is one of the channels that have been used to Target me in particular multiple times YT update 2023 meant to impersonate the YouTube policy program actually one of them so far was partner program one of them was policy updates etc etc because they are constantly trying to

refine their distribution method and mix it up and make things more effective and get more clicks actually I can find these I'm adding this in PostScript I can find these in real time just by sitting here and searching for channels with YouTube Partner or policy in the name because the focus seems to be on multi-year-old smaller channels for this one this iteration which are then rebranded

and used to impersonate YouTube itself and distribute malware it's happening as I script this the YouTube Shadow economy is in full swing the thing is when you try to report these channels you can only do that from the about page because the refined ones don't have any videos and when they do they simply share briefly with the targets and then remove them on the about page

to report as many of these channels as I can find but the shadow economy Architects have settled on something rather clever here where the attempted moderation at scale of YouTube's platform actually doesn't provide the proper Avenue to correctly report the problem I'm not even really upset here to be honest YouTube didn't exactly know that this was going to become a huge thing but it certainly needs

to be addressed and again to their credit I can also see as a couple of the accounts get suspended in real time after they have been used to send a bunch of the phishing emails I'm trying to be fair here but the problem isn't going away it's actively getting worse there are still four years later a large concentration of enormous crypto livestream scams based on the

impersonation of Brad garlinghouse Tesla and SpaceX another one was called Arc invest or by Kathy Wood have been used for the past two years at least simply rotating through a couple of keywords and never disappearing the largest yield is of course from bigger channels so the shadow economy refines its method of targeting creators like me and as they do the cycle continues and exacerbates and gets

worse there are some very very big channels that have been compromised this way tens probably hundreds of millions of dollars at this point over these years have been stolen from everyday viewers who get caught in the churn of the Shadow economy and yet it just keeps happening I understand that there are problems at scale for any platform I understand that it's difficult sometimes to moderate this

on YouTube's part but I mean come on I can sit here and actively report things for eight hours a day just cycling through keyword searches that I know contain harmful scam crypto content like this and uncovering the accounts that they are spinning up in real time which means YouTube Sincerely come on guys can you not pay someone one person to sit there as a full-time job

and clean out the dark corners of your platform before the scan can happen can we be proactive here I could literally Do It For You full time successfully and save people millions of dollars if you pay me of course I'll take a tiny fraction of the value I would have saved your customers at the very least though can you maybe not demonetize my stuff and force

me out of the algorithm it's kind of not very fun and there's other bigger problems to worry about here at the end of the day the YouTube Shadow economy as I call it is in full swing it's evolving and dare I say growing right now with the latest version being private videos with malware in the description being sent to creators using the framework of YouTube itself

to impersonate Authority very sneaky as I find these things I report them to YouTube obviously as we're able to get our hands on the malware samples a couple of them we have indexed them into databases and I have a rudimentary Hardware lab up and running right now with more progress every day so hopefully I can continue to at least have a dampening effect on the impact

that this Shadow economy has on reputable creators but it's an ongoing fight once again I don't want to just talk about this stuff I want to have a tangible impact but I also need to pay the bills the security product list down below is a method where I can do hopefully both of those things at the same time and it's an involving projects where Community feedback

in particular will also be taken into account to improve the overall design and product list ultimately this is a continuation of a threat I've been warning about for almost four consecutive years every few months a massive Creator gets compromised in basically an identical way by the same group of people and all the reaction channels go oh my God new scam on YouTube has huge consequences or

the new threat that just hit so and so and it's really bad but the truth is it's not new not in the slightest it hasn't been new for a very long time it just slowly grows and grows and grows and changes like a living organism a parasitic organism feeding on the YouTube Community like a bloodbag host but definitely not new we should emphasis on the word

should here be able to defeat it with the proper countermeasures and hopefully Google will start to Implement those counter measures I'd even be happy to help them myself personally because from what I see the solution could be as simple as a paid intern a single paid intern with some common sense and a banhammer then you feed those bands that the single Common Sense intern is able

to find with a couple of keyword searches in five seconds you feed those bands into a check and balance system whatever you come up with and have a more senior employee or something like that review the choices Bingo problem solved that would genuinely solve the problem anyway that's it if you want support there are links down below today I'll focus on channel memberships right here on

YouTube as the number one call out where you can get a little comment badge with the logo and bronze silver gold or whatever and I prioritize your comments more to respond to when I even have time to read a batch of them but I'll cut it there and stop rambling don't fall for this YouTubers don't let your audience fall for just don't let anyone fall for

this there's no reason that these scammers should be making off with tens of millions of dollars of hard-working people's money it just doesn't need to happen as always thank you all for watching and have a nice night thank you [Music] [Music]