Bitcoin Forum

Edit: I contacted the Binance live chat support and told them about the issue. They said they'll look into it.
For now, we can report the channels on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Cl2g2xFTZoAEldxYVzQFg
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYP6V7c4M026AXMr4ng6aQA
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY3sxY1IkEC4c210mDrU83w
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS4g09DPtz7u_S1hTStWtlA.


So I was surfing through YouTube and something caught my eye. A subscription to Binance exchange. I knew I was not subscribed to it, so I decided to investigate. This is something I've never seen before. Geohistory, a great channel with historical events explained through maps, has clearly been hacked, and the channels are now called Binance. Apart from that, they are broadcasting right now what is clearly a scam scheme. Here's one of the broadcasts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqN5GwYVDLI.
Has there been any reaction from Binance yet? The impostors did not only hack the creators I liked, they are spoiling the reputation of a great exchange. Is there anything we can do to help stop this?
I'll try contacting Binance via a chat support on their website.

You can go and report it as inappropriate content,

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802027?hl=en

there have been thousands of youtube accounts being hacked and taken over by the hackers and posting crypto related stuff like fake giveaways.

Just type "Binance giveaway" in the search button, you will see a lot of videos about it. I guess it's time for the community to help fight this cyber criminals by reporting it.

The reputation of Binance isn't what is at stake here. It's people's money. Someone just sent a 0.2BTC tx to the address they've placed in the video.

For reference in case the video goes down, this is basically most likely a hacked verified YT account someone took over and started a Live on, changing the channel name and everything as if it's Binance's.

The BTC address in their video is: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/3Asy3jfxQ6NDDRdUmfQ5CA4UNSL2agBELq
The ETH address in their video is: https://etherscan.io/address/0x03209fc3305f22226fba633d23498ecbf41896a0

I took a look over their ETH address and apparently two addresses have moved funds FROM Binance to this ETH wallet. At first glance, I thought I could track down the address (I initially thought the hackers withdrew money from their own accounts to this address), but I was wrong.

WalletExplorer is of no help in the research of the two addresses. In fact, this is not the only livestream on YouTube that's scamming people. Go to this search query and you'll find a ton of these fake livestreams: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=give+away+btc&sp=EgJAAQ%253D%253D

I have contacted Binance a few minutes ago to let them know about the ongoing scams, providing them the necessary links. They will probably ban these addresses from withdraws so their users cannot send funds to them, and the YT accounts/videos will be reported. At least that's what they told me. Other than that, there's nothing we can do unless we take all addresses and try to somehow link them to the owner (scammer).

What happened is.. the Twitter scammers have moved to YouTube.

wow, this is a high-quality scam. How can they have a binance verified account in youtube, that's a crazy job behind this scam.

At this point they have scammed a big amount of money, i hope youtube does something about this scam before more people keep losing their money.

Here's a list of all the addresses I've found on the YT fake livestreams that are active right now, in case someone wants to do some in-depth research:

ETH:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x8c427c26766aec6b8c148a08c52ed5fab2d52ede
https://etherscan.io/address/0xea4B4498900Db9a3a03b0CbABB1e19E7bbA401f0
https://etherscan.io/address/0x4b06aa26fd16e32b8c66168ef6e5d536f25711f4
https://etherscan.io/address/0x8c5a64b136e24b345dc75d169bb258a2a9a9e121
https://etherscan.io/address/0x6a24d8dc533006cce707fd304d7b024a89f9e97e
https://etherscan.io/address/0x7055bbABCE4e3AC4Ea2b9c3fB2CA4141Bf3C19A6
https://etherscan.io/address/0xFFBE86B44c1F30f6CD9cE77Cf0C6399A9bba44A6
https://etherscan.io/address/0x51F401EB18A81E7ef6a52BD20E90dEa00F029c45
https://etherscan.io/address/0x651E714648946bEE5d04A1114806e818CCdA5b31


BTC:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/3HUqbKwGTuGEGSu1ifJPrx9caL9wwXxxuR
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1Px6KZ7CbwHWj492fSjgadxHF8nc5s73Cu
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1bin16278hB79v79HGzuHYAmpMLWTREeV
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/3JRXCBbbBHoDzpwxzKU2cTPjgjCLuWXp5t
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1PJYDmgfS9JmzZanKuj397zsY66kvz4qqu
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/3NCvHcHFALYRn7cjeHfmdJeMvccCAhCWgY
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1265Gc2Jqn1prMk6KKY2HN1SEnA9nNJ8Vo
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1FLJci2Dah2GzCcu2Cur2bkyNwsSxH79gk
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1GkPywwoBXapMDd3svVzvCjUaoNsD9GyVu
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/39aDKUukKu1L2h6nUtfh1aj2ADawqtAJd3

BCH:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/address/qq8nm7wknd0d8cqd40gucg0fmw06r7xhpuhrsxkx4l

XRP:
https://bithomp.com/explorer/r385PmcKKqyb45b6Bc8LQLuRfgjGHz1FaC
https://bithomp.com/explorer/rEVHZDenLxo1JCfy3whFSdRyGue1oBotk8
https://bithomp.com/explorer/rEEhZ32ndjGwKgwYHjP79XkXi9M4zcYexx

These wallets are currently holding a total of $26,538.64‬, or approx. 2.690BTC.

Found links between the following BTC addresses:

• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/tools/path/?start=1Px6KZ7CbwHWj492fSjgadxHF8nc5s73Cu&end=1bin16278hB79v79HGzuHYAmpMLWTREeV
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/tools/path/?start=1Px6KZ7CbwHWj492fSjgadxHF8nc5s73Cu&end=3JRXCBbbBHoDzpwxzKU2cTPjgjCLuWXp5t
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/tools/path/?start=1Px6KZ7CbwHWj492fSjgadxHF8nc5s73Cu&end=1265Gc2Jqn1prMk6KKY2HN1SEnA9nNJ8Vo
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/tools/path/?start=1bin16278hB79v79HGzuHYAmpMLWTREeV&end=3JRXCBbbBHoDzpwxzKU2cTPjgjCLuWXp5t
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/tools/path/?start=1bin16278hB79v79HGzuHYAmpMLWTREeV&end=1265Gc2Jqn1prMk6KKY2HN1SEnA9nNJ8Vo
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/tools/path/?start=3JRXCBbbBHoDzpwxzKU2cTPjgjCLuWXp5t&end=1265Gc2Jqn1prMk6KKY2HN1SEnA9nNJ8Vo

I don't know any Ethereum/BCH/XRP analysis websites I can link addresses through. Hopefully this helps boost the start of anyone who wants to go further in this analysis.

@seoincorporation, It's actually not that hard, all you need is a verified youtube account with a checkmark. You can then change the brand name of the channel.^[1] (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657964?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en) Youtube channels are considered as Brands rather than something personal so changing a name isn't hard on youtube. I have seen this happening to one of the channels I follow, the same happened to them as well, all of sudden a binance Livestream came out of nowhere and that channel had nothing to do with cryptos later in few hours the YouTuber mentioned on his twitter that his account has been hacked whats even worse is that they removed him from the ownership of the channel and he lost total control of the channel and youtube support weren't able to help him, The guy had around 100K subs and he lost it all in a blink of an eye, so yeah people should start caring about their passwords as these scammers are getting cleaver every passing day. I highly recommend using something like keypass as brute-forcing is becoming easier...

Recently?  I wonder how hard it is to get your Youtube account hacked--I guess it depends on whatever your password is (the obvious answer) and how easy it is to recover it once it is hacked.  I wasn't aware that this was becoming a problem, but maybe I've had the naive belief that it would be hard to pull off a hack/scam on Youtube.  Makes me wonder if this is at least somewhat in response to Youtube's banning of crypto videos not too long ago.

Oh crap.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but damn.  Who in their right mind would send bitcoin to an address in a Youtube video, even if the channel is claiming to be that of Binance?  Hopefully that didn't represent the person's life savings.

I guess their motive is to destroy the reputation of binance as well as hacking, create FUD. Why not hack binance directly? because they cant. Wise users will not fall for this always check official social media from their website usually located at the bottom. And those transactions on their wallets it is possible that some of it are fake, sending a fund to their own wallet to lure people to make it look real.

@The Pharmacist, Unless you have a million subs or something near to that you can basically forget about the recovery of the channel, Youtube accounts are brand accounts as I said before, what this means is that you own the account but you can be removed from the ownership if someone else gets access to your account. So you will get your Google account back but if the hackers removed you from the owner list when you got hacked then you can consider that channel pretty much gone as youtube doesn't get involved in recovering those. Unless you have contacts high above in Youtube Support who can reverse the ownership transfer, these people are pretty much out of luck...

You can read it here: Security Warning For 23 Million YouTube Creators Following ‘Massive’ Hack Attack (https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/09/23/youtube-security-warning-issued-for-23-million-creators-as-massive-hack-attack-confirmed/#644109556b4f).

It was reported as early as September 2019, and then after that we have seen hundreds if not thousands of fake give-aways on Youtube after that.

Though this is wishful thinking and that chances are definitely low, I like to think that the 0.2 BTC transaction was a transaction made by the scammers(I truly hope) as to hopefully convince people.

Anyway, this is like the Twitter scams in the past again; just with a different platform, and somewhat more convincing in my opinion. Truly sucks, but once again, this is going to be a hard lesson for a good number of people.

I think not only YouTube has imposter. Many social medium platform has been impersonating Binance ever since and the address were that 0.2btc was sent obviously their dummy account
I definitely agree with you. To make things real they should have done this and doing a realistic approach is the better way to let those victim the giveaway is real. I just really hope this is the reason and not someone else hard earned money. 

That still doesn't explain the rest of the money though. As kevin mentioned, the scammer(s) have collected a lot of money at this point, so some people do fall for their tricks.

I guess they fall for the 'verified' mark. That shows how some people lose their awareness of scam when they 'believed' at something even if it's too good to be true.

For some people it's enough to see the little check next to a name to believe the channel is legit. I wouldn't send my money to a giveaway, it's against the common sense. If you want to do a giveaway, it makes no sense to make me pay for it.

Anyways, this is sad because too many are still falling victims for it and these hackers still find ways to proceed with their scams and make people trust them. Without the necessary education to find out what's legit and what isn't, falling victims to them is easy.

I just wonder when the hell is Google going to take action and stop these streams.

The scammers become too smart now because of they are finding new ways to cheat people to utilizing the binance fame and binance name. So better to stay away from those kind of giveaway because binance is not going to runs any giveaway through YouTube and you can cross check the details about their official website for genuine giveaways.

The binance gives official announcement on Twitter regarding this issue.

https://i.imgur.com/Q3rNyHg.jpg

After what happened with the crypto content creators on youtube recently (channels getting striked etc) I do believe that it will take longer and longer before those streams are taken down. Crypto related videos on youtube are getting falsely reported a lot, either by scammers or competing altcoins or content creators, which means that Google has to spend time analyzing the reports manually.

If Google yet again ends up taking (but now serious) action against those scam streams in an automated fashion by their algorithm, I'm pretty sure that they will affect even the non scammy crypto content. In other words, there will only be losers.

I still think that people just need to understand that free money doesn't exist. Sending 0.1BTC to someone that promises you to send 0.5BTC back is just retarded.

Yeah, it's also a problem... I think it's rather easy to draw a line between scam and non-scam (if a person's asking to deposit money to a wallet for something greater in return, it's a scam). But algorithms might not be good at distinguishing different cases. The live transactions are still on, and there are still thousands watching them. This 'verified account' thing is very smart, it makes the scam more truth-like. After all, sometimes casinos, for instance, do offer deposit bonuses that might look like the same scheme...
Thanks, I did not know it was that common! I've never seen an account getting hijacked like that and used for scamming, especially on Youtube. Unfortunately, it seems that there's nothing Binance can do, because it's been a day since this scam started, and the scammers are still broadcasting.

Oh come on, if I put up a livestream calling out people to send me $5 in order to receive $50 in return, I bet it would be taken down within minutes.

I feel like Google is so strongly against crypto while pretending to help and support the community. Otherwise, if they cared enough, these lives would be shut down almost as soon as they're up and crypto-related vids wouldn't have been deleted.

It's common sense. You just take a short look at the list of livestreams impersonating Binance and within a minute you'd get the idea that it's a scam. Let's not victimize Google.

I kinda agree with you but we do have to keep in mind that Youtube moderation is also done by humans. I did end up reporting the livestreams and i got this ^{( see image below )} message each time I reported. While it says the moderation is a constant process it doesn't say anything about how long it might take. So far it has been around an hour and both of the livestreams I reported are still up, I will update this post if there is any change in their status. What I find interesting is these both livestreams are in being streamed in a "restricted mode" ^{( 2nd image )}. Dunno why the scammers would want that, As they’d want as many people as they can to watch their stream. I guess they did it to not allow users to comments on the live chat.

Also, I couldn't find anything related to how many reports does it takes for a video to be taken down, I don't think a single report does the trick on youtube. It has to be multiple reports I believe to make youtube take an action against a video unless it's a copyright claim. Anyway, I will see how things go from here...

https://i.imgur.com/0NoT6hD.png

https://i.imgur.com/EN9mjfl.png

Wow. I know all kinds of hanky panky goes on with YT and other accounts getting hacked but this is some level of scammery I've to admit I'm new to. Streaming giveaways is a thing? Though it's not a giveaway if you have to give something to get something back.

Crypto advertising soliciting funds is an auto ban on Google isn't it? I know it isn't a blind ban but haven't needed it to find out but surprised these don't get taken down faster.

They took it down pretty fast iyam... Within 2 hours both of the videos I reported have been removed. Considering they would get hundreds of thousands of reports, 2 hours to review isn't bad... They also took down other videos with the similar titles which I didn't even report. So it looks like we can do our part. Just report them and leave a detailed comment and the videos should go down.

These two channels were the ones I reported:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Cl2g2xFTZoAEldxYVzQFg/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/antonioeafsi/videos

https://i.imgur.com/hAcn9RP.png

@buwaytress That only applies on AdWords you can still upload content on Youtube, Rank keywords on Google if they are crypto-related, You just can't advertise on Adwords which too isn't enforced properly, Also it's not a 100% fool-proof system I have seen many ads which seem to have by-pass their apparent ban. Google AdWords, however, do allow ads from "Regulated exchanges" I dunno wtf is that supposed to mean or how does one become Regulated with Google, Only they are allowed to advertise their business with Google.

More and more cases of YouTube accounts get hacked and streaming binance to fool people who do not know this. Every time the livestream shows on my homepage I usually report the account directly to get banned immediately within a few hours because this is very unsettling.

Google is connected with Youtube, right? I guess I should provide additional security to my email there.
I am not sure if these hacks are true, but another theory could be the creation of dummy channels while using subscriber, comment, and like bots making it look like a legitimate and true channel of some platform.

It's great that they are taking some videos down, but it seems that these methods aren't very effective. I cannot come up with a better one, but it does not mean that what we have is okay. If you do as much as just type 'Binance' on youtube right now, the first four videos you'll see (sorted automatically by relevance) are 4 scammy live broadcasts in a row. Each is these broadcasts has thousands of viewers (maybe they're bought, I don't know, but look bad to me) right now, and it's been a couple of days since this thing started, I personally reported it to a live support chat worker that said that this will be forwarded to the security team specifically, you guys and many others probably reported the videos already, and yet the scammers successfully continue their activities.

Edit: You know what? I've just accessed your links and the videos are showing just fine to me! Interesting! Maybe I did not report these specific channels (although I guess I did), and Youtube is being diplomatic, not showing these videos to you since you clearly don't want to see them but also not really blocking them for other people! Are they still unavailable on your side?

@Kryptqnick the ones I reported are gone... Checked from another Google Account. However, I do see a new stream on one of the channels https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Cl2g2xFTZoAEldxYVzQFg/videos It's a shame even after reporting them that the account was hacked they haven't suspended its ability to Livestream. This is something they can definitely work on, Why just take the video down when you know the account is hacked, Just lock it away till its restored to its original owner... smdh...

I think the lack of a real substantive presence that Binance has on YouTube makes it easier for these scams to go on. A simple search on YouTube shows that there are live streams that are trying to look like binance accounts but, yeah, that's the ultimate motivation in that someone will send in their Bitcoin to a wallet or send them to Telegram and people will be fleeced out of their money. I do see that the one that's live streaming has 1.1 K fake followers in about 300 fake up votes and the link is to a telegram where I assumed they purport to be Binance as well.

Yeah, maybe those particular videos are gone but when I access the links you've attached to that post about reporting them, I can see both accounts, and on one of them in a live broadcast that is still working just as if nothing happened. Here, I'll attach some screenshots...
In any case, the fact that even though it's known that it's a scam, that the account has been hacked and everything, live broadcast is still possible - that's a major downside which nearly renders the efforts of reporting the channels useless...
https://i.imgur.com/Klw791H.png
https://i.imgur.com/3IwdkpB.png
https://i.imgur.com/863h5uH.png