YouTube Channels Hacked In ‘One World Cryptocurrency’ Scam
Leading crypto YouTube channels, including CoinBureau, Real Vision, BitBoy Crypto and many others were victims of a scam that placed an altcoin ad targeting the channel viewers.
A mysterious video called “One World Cryptocurrency” appeared on several popular crypto / finance YouTube channels – without the owners’ permission. The video has all the signs of a giveaway scam.
The 1-minute video featured promotion of a new BSC token called “One World Cryptocurrency” (OWCY). It features a “contact address”, and a listed pre-sale price of “0.0001’ (with no unit of account provided).
It also listed a number of crypto assets through which “investors” are able to purchase the token, including USDT, USDC, BNB, and ETH.
The video also made claims that OWYC will be listed on both CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko – however neither of them have done so, as of yet.
BSC and Ethereum addresses were provided for buyers to acquire the new coin. However, BscScan and EtherScan show that neither address has pulled in more than a few hundred dollars as of yet.
Giveaway scams are nothing new to the crypto space. A lot of it is due to potential for anonymity and irreversibility that blockchain transactions provide, which have also made them popular tools for ransomware attacks. As an example a fake Michael Saylor giveaway scam stole $1.1 million last week.
YouTube Channels Targeted
Many of the hacked YouTube channels took it to Twitter to warn about the OWYC video having randomly appeared in their YouTube subscribers’ feeds. One of them was Coin Bureau.
“So our YouTube channel was just hacked. Have absolutely no idea how this happened. All accounts are secured with ultra strong passwords and Google security keys. @YouTubeCreators this is a serious problem which other creators are also experiencing. Please fix”
So our YouTube channel was just hacked. Have absolutely no idea how this happened. All accounts are secured with ultra strong passwords and Google security keys. @YouTubeCreators this is a serious problem which other creators are also experiencing. Please fix ?
According to Coin Bureau that all of his accounts were secured with strong passwords and security keys, and called upon YouTube to address the issue.
Dozens of other YouTubers were affected, such as Arun Maini, Real Vision, Ivan on Tech, and Bitboy Crypto. Most have since removed the video from their channels.
