by Google
Hackers have found another way to make money through fraudulent practices on the Internet and are exploiting YouTubers. Fraudsters steal trusted YouTube channels and then launch illegal live streams on them, which in the vast majority of cases ends with the complete cancellation of the YouTube channel. Over the past 3 months, there have been several account thefts that we managed to save, which is why we decided to write an article about what to watch out for and what to do if someone hacks your YouTube channel.
HOW TO RECOGNIZE A HACKER ATTACK?
Hackers and fraudsters on the Internet have become more cunning in recent times and it is much more difficult to detect them. They often hide behind the names of trusted brands or pretend to be a startup that is developing a new software or game.
The whole scam works by sending a fake email with a lucrative offer of cooperation to a YouTube creator. This email always contains a request to download the software. As soon as you start installing the program, a new extension will automatically be added to your web browser, through which the hackers will steal all the data they need. What is very dangerous about the whole scam is that as soon as you start installing the program, your data is gone within a few seconds.
THEY STOLE MY ACCOUNT AND I NEED HELP
By downloading and installing the software, you gave hackers a free pass to your computer, where they will download all your data, log in to your YouTube channel, change your passwords, and cut off contact. They have successfully stolen it. So what should you watch out for? You can recognize a hacker by these signs:
1. EMAIL ADDRESS CAN LIE
Even if an email may look completely credible, always check the email address from which the message was sent to you to be sure. Some hackers are less consistent and, even if they pretend to be a trusted brand, they will send the email from a strange address such as 5438support@gmail.com. Other, more cunning scammers are careful about the email address, even creating fake websites and trying to make it look trustworthy, such as eve.commercial@nordkeeper.com. A fraudulent email can also look like this:
Trusted brands usually have official email addresses in the form of meno@znacka.com/sk/net, such as adam@vidadu.net. First of all, be very careful of collaborations that come from web browser email addresses such as gmail or hotmail and always compare the sender's email address with the official email addresses on the official website. Be careful, scammers sometimes include their "official website" in emails, which is just a fake page. Therefore, always find the official website by entering keywords into web browsers, for example, by entering "nordvpn" into Google.
2. THEY OFFER ADVANTAGEOUS COOPERATION
Hackers want to interest you and extract the data necessary to steal your YouTube channel, so they will hide behind a trustworthy company with an interesting offer that will appeal to you. The entire communication looks completely normal at first glance, the terms of cooperation and the fee are discussed, but later there always comes a phase when the scammers will encourage you to download some program.
Hackers often use the practice of claiming that some operating systems have problems with the program and therefore the approached YouTuber should download the program and try it out to be sure that everything will work properly for him.
3. THEY DEVELOP SOFTWARE AND IMPRESS A WELL-KNOWN BRAND
Be especially very careful with cooperation offers where a company or startup asks you to download and test the software or game it is developing. You will not download a game or a super app, but you will give hackers access to steal data. As we have mentioned several times, a popular scam tactic of hackers is impersonating well-known brands. Recently, we have noticed that scammers have returned with fake offers in the name of the NordVPN brand, which itself warns about these hackers on its website in an article about internet scams. NordVPN has also published information that it only works with the nordvpn.com and nordvpn.org domains and urges people to verify an offer sent from another domain via customer service on the nordvpn.com website or by email at support@nordvpn.com.
EXAMPLE OF A SCAM WE DETECTED
Very recently, we even managed to uncover a very sophisticated scam. Members of our network received a collaboration offer from Beer Night Studio, which tried to appear very credible. The offer was sent from the email marian.brown@beernightstudios.tech and looked like this:
The scammers met all the above-mentioned signs, impersonated an existing brand, created a web domain, a relatively trustworthy email, and sent a detailed offer of cooperation so that everything seemed convincing. In this case, the hackers took advantage of the fact that it was a smaller brand that did not have an official website, only a Facebook profile, and it was not entirely easy to find their official contacts.
However, since we have experience with hackers and the condition for cooperation was to download the game, we decided to verify the authenticity of the offer. First, we tried to find their official website, but since we did not find any, we also started searching on social networks. We finally managed to find Beer Night Studio on Facebook, where they also provided a contact.
Once we found the official email, we contacted Beer Night Studio to ask them to confirm whether this was a legitimate offer for our YouTube partners and we received this response:
The official contact clearly confirmed that this was a scam and our suspicions turned out to be justified. Therefore, we firmly believe that if someone approaches you with an offer that will include downloading games or programs, you should definitely verify whether this is a trustworthy contact. As you can see, in this case, the scammers had set up a convincing-looking email address and overall it was a very sophisticated scam that seemed completely credible until the last moment.
This scam also only confirms that hackers are becoming more and more cunning and purposefully hide behind brands that are difficult to verify the veracity of the data and regularly hide behind a nice email that looks professional. Therefore, be extremely careful and pay close attention to collaborations that require downloading a game or software.
WHY DO THEY DO IT?
Hackers have found a way to make a lot of money with a relatively simple scam. After the scammer steals your account, he starts a live stream on it, offering viewers cryptocurrency appreciation. Scammers stream recordings of online conferences or lessons from well-known experts and also use bots to make it look like thousands of people are watching the stream. They create the impression that it is a trustworthy live stream and invite people to send any amount of bitcoin to their account and get back double the deposit. Of course, no appreciation of bitcoins will occur and naive viewers who were interested in investing will never see their money again and the scammers will have made money again. At the same time, the movement of bitcoins is very difficult to track and it is impossible for an ordinary person to get their money back.
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF?
First of all, you should protect your YouTube channel and all your social networks withtwo-step verification. This verification will protect you from someone else logging into your account, but it will not protect you from an infected file that you install yourself, thinking that it is part of a collaboration. You need to be especially careful with this type of fraud and especially watch for the 3 signs of a hacker described above.
Scammers on the Internet have not disappeared, they are just better at masking themselves today. Therefore, if you receive any offer of cooperation, be very careful and check whether it is a trustworthy source. However, if you were unable to prevent this and hackers stole your account, then be sure tocontact usand we will help you get your channel back as quickly as possible.
