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Comment by compiler1410 | Hacker News Reader

>Billionaire CEO named namedson

This isn't Slayers X.

But on a serious note if he's a billionaire then he can drop the whole monetization schtick. Telegram has become unusuable in the last few years. There's crypto scam ads everywhere.

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Whenever I open Youtube via an EU proxy, I see "a crypto scam" video at the front page, the first one. The title is "+35 ETH generated last month by effectively using the contract bot for trading" and the account name is "Web3 developer", and the label says "Sponsored". The thumbnail displays a happy bearded man's face resembling that famous Youtuber who gives away money, a fire emoji and words "+35 ETH in July personal bot".

So you cannot really blame Telegram.

Forgive my scepticism, but I’m going to have to ask you for a screenshot and which country YouTube thought you were connecting from.

I’m asking because, at least according to my understanding of YouTube’s ad policies, that shouldn’t be allowed: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/14009787?hl=en&r...

He said video not ad

It has a "Sponsored" label and doesn't match my interests at all, but is still displayed at the first place.

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvlbunSGDmU

Screenshot (title has changed from what I wrote earlier or this is another ad): https://imgur.com/a/TX0xB9y

Country is the one in Europe.

Maybe this is not a scam and therefore is allowed? Maybe it is a joke video? I didn't watch the video, but the title and thumbnails looks like a "scam".

I don't know. I analyzed the code from below the video with GPT[0] and it flagged a bunch of stuff it considered shady.

[0] Every time I mention using AI my posts get downvoted to infinity, so take the above with a grain of salt :)

I don't know anything about coding crypto, but it looks to me like it has a bunch of functions which each return a little hex string which it merges together into a wallet address which it then transfers all your funds to. I could be totally wrong and it's all above board.

Here's the code from the video:

https://hastebin.com/share/paxisehuki.php

You can see that most functions deal with converting hex strings to bytes or parsing utf-8 despite their name. For example, checkLiquidity seems to just convert hex representation to binary and not what its name says.

The contract is payable, i.e. will accept ether as payment but doesn't actually do anything. From a glance looks like the withdrawal function is setup to generate the address of the scammer - through all of those obfuscated functions that have hex string slices - so ultimately only they can remove the funds.

It also looks like the contract requires the user to deposit 0.4 ETH for it to work.

The first wallet address in that file has a balance equivalent to $8m USD - dang.

https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

I think this might be not an address belonging to the scammer, but an address of an exchange or something like that. Why would he write his address in clear text.

I can corroborate GP's claim. I've used AdBlock at home, but at work my Youtube main page has a persistent ad that's like what GP described. Location: Hong Kong with an office network that presumably VPNs to USA.

Billionaires don’t become billionaires by using their own money to solve problems

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