Is there a Bitcoin scam running now live on the official Tesla YouTube? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a Bitcoin scam running now live on the official Tesla YouTube?

youtube.com

14 pointssn_master13 comments

If you look at the playlists it's just some arabic euronews channel that was renamed to look like the real deal.

https://www.youtube.com/@euroresla/playlists

Yup, and it has a very similar sub count too (2.26M vs 2.29M for the real Tesla channel). I thought it was legit but was confused how Jack Dorsey agreed to be there, and then it became clear it was a scam when I clicked that link in the chat which says in order to get the crypto giveaway YOU have to send them currency for them to double it for you.

I don't know if they're using the same addresses for everybody or randomizing a bit, but the ETH address being shown to be has received ~1,200 USD as of now.

Edit: Looks like they didn't delete any videos of the hijacked channel, they just unlisted them all, but they can be seen from the Playlists tab https://www.youtube.com/@euroresla/playlists

This is a blatant case of impersonation.

Edit II: This is happening across a lot of channels, not just that one.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=CRS-26+Mission+...

These are not real and are getting more popular recently. It's a "live" video but of an older recording of a public speaking event involving Elon and other big names, in which they briefly discuss cryptocurrency among many other topics. The name of the YT video stream is usually something like "Elon is starting a new coin, announcement live now" or "Elon Bitcoin giveaway limited time only"

They play the video picture-in-picture and outside the video frame is a QR code which takes you to a site with one of a couple clever strategies:

1) A "mint" of Elon's new token and a counter that shows the token mint is almost completed (e.g. 9973/10000)

2) A more basic "crypto doubling" philanthropy event including a feed like those seen on DeFi sites, showing wallets depositing ETH/whatever and immediately being sent double whatever the deposit was

I checked the wallets again, and they made about 20k USD so far (it was 2k USD when I posted the thread here earlier this morning). People are actually falling for this :/

https://blockchair.com/dogecoin/address/DGXhA2Zob3KYurxEaRQ5...

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/14ry1mGi5nKNU65oXgt9v...

https://www.blockchain.com/eth/address/0x3A2A0510CC7Bc6dB48D...

https://etherscan.io/address/0x3A2A0510CC7Bc6dB48D8666DCa053...

This showed up on my YouTube home page and its linking to a Tesla verified channel w/ 2.26M subscribers but zero videos. The chat is linking to a website about a crypto giveaway that literally says "Send your (crypto) for 2X". There's over 12,000 people watching as of this submission.

It's definitely that old scam that used to be floating around on Twitter. Read this familiar blurb for Elon on this part of the video. https://youtu.be/3fMGjJVijdY?t=4537

Seen similar one before, reported it and it got shut down in a few days...

Sam here. But how these channels have so many subs?

it's a hacked channel that they renamed and changed its profile picture and unlisted all its previous videos.

Couldn’t it have been purchased?

Possible but unlikely

They couldn’t even be arsed to make up some cartoon nfts.

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