Steve Wozniak Sues YouTube Over Twitter-Like Bitcoin Scam

[pakhitheboss]

Youtube's inability to stop these scams had led to this sue. Other celebrities should also follow the footstep of Steve Wozniak. The number of scams using celebrity names has increased a lot on Youtube after the Twitter incident.

Such incidents are tarnishing the reputation of prominent celebrities and also the community. In my opinion it is the responsibility of the social media platform to control and keep a check of activities happening on their platform.

[DoubleEdgeEX]

I wonder if Elon Musk and Co will try to sue Twitter over the previous hacks too.

That's a different case, they can sue Twitter for the security breach but it will be a real debate if Twitter as a company is actually at fault here, since they claim their staff was the target of a social engineering attack, so they could get away blaming others.

Mmh, Youtube could come up with a similar excuse, it just wouldn´t sound honest and easy to see through though. I understand that Twitter might use a random developer as a scapegoat, but that´s a solution for Youtube too. Whatever may happens, I hope they do something and work on the issue and not decide to ignore it like Microsoft does with it´s coding mistakes....

[LogitechMouse]

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I think Youtube should step up and better police their service with this rampant fake giveaways promoted on their platform. It's about time, specially on what had happen to Twitter in recent days.

I've seen some ads too regarding these crypto giveaways and this can be a bad sign for the Youtube.

I've seen some popular names in that ads including Vitalik Buterin and it is stated on the ad that he is conducting an ETH Giveaway. Like WTF is happening with Youtube. Do they have a team which are observing the ads that are being put in the video. Maybe the case that he is suing too isn't the one that I've seen days ago but the fact that it falls into a crypto giveaway which will turn out to be a scam is a proof that Youtube must adjust with regards to their advertisements.

This can be a huge problem to Youtube but I think that they can handle it and will take massive action to this problem.

[stompix]

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I believe it's all automated these days and only videos with huge numbers of human reports might get reviewed by a human. This is how they do these 5 second deletions, demonetization of anything featuring a swastika, etc. But the last time they tried to fight crypto scams, people were crying about censorhip and how evil Google hates crypto.

Yeah, it's all automatic and scammers know that you can trick detections with changed screens, minimizing the window with the copyrighted material like PiP (Picture-in-Picture) or adding layers with different information like price ticker or a newsbar. Automatic detection might fail, but you need to step up a response when some type of videos are reported. I'm pretty sure youtube treats scams with low priority and the lawsuit of Wozniak shows that maybe they have internal faster ticket support when it comes to verified publishers but whatever it was it's clearly ineffective!

As fo the other scams, it's pretty hard to take a stance against them, where do you put the limit on what is considered a scam, should we ban shills for a project we know it's impossible to be realized and it will be a failure? Everyone knew Juicero as a piece of sh*** but you can't stop a company from selling crap.

~

Mmh, Youtube could come up with a similar excuse, it just wouldn´t sound honest and easy to see through though. I understand that Twitter might use a random developer as a scapegoat, but that´s a solution for Youtube too. Whatever may happens, I hope they do something and work on the issue and not decide to ignore it like Microsoft does with it´s coding mistakes....

Doubt it, twitter can blame the third party for the hack of their employee details, Youtube can't blame a staff they trained for his laziness, it would be like a repair shop telling you to sue the employee for not fixing your airbag or a restaurant telling you to sue the meat shop for the rotten meat. They simply didn't do their job, they ignored it and reacted too late. But I have a feeling they will settle this outside the court and in reality, nothing will be drastically improved, probably the solution involves increasing support by a huge number and that costs money.

[NotATether]

For the Wozniak case, it's straight sailing:

YouTube has been “unresponsive” to Wozniak’s repeated requests to take down the fraudulent videos, he said.

he notified them multiple times that some channels are running a scam, they are using his name, his face, his reputation and they didn't do anything. And at the same time, they are deleting videos with more than 5 seconds from a movie trailer or 10 seconds from an open air concert, they will have no defense since their mechanism should have instantly flagged all that content showing him

Unless their AI had a facial representation of Steve Wozniak's face then automating reporting of such videos is very difficult since if it's not written to intake "clues" from the video to determine who, if it's an influential person, is featured in the video it can't tell the difference between "Steve Wozniak making a promotion" and "a person making a promotion". I'm sure Youtube can already detect the presence of people in a video.

Maybe youtube partners get a higher priority in having their reports processed? That might explain why things like these tend to stay up while copyrighted content is deleted fairly quickly.

[Shasha80]

Indeed, YouTube related to video scams is very slow response, I also sometimes upset to see video scams circulating on YouTube.
Hopefully with Steve Wozniak sues YouTube, there will be strict action from YouTube for video scams that are still circulating.
So the victims of the video promotion scams can be minimized, I often make report to YouTube related to video scams. But YouTube
responds around 3-5 days, and this is too long in my opinion.

[kryptqnick]

Steve Wozniak Sues YouTube Over Twitter-Like Bitcoin Scam

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak says YouTube has for months allowed scammers to use his name and likeness as part of a phony bitcoin giveaway similar to the one that was quickly extinguished by Twitter Inc. last week.

Scammers used images and video of Wozniak, who left Apple in 1985, to convince YouTube users that he was hosting a live giveaway and anyone who sent him bitcoins will get double the number back, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in state court in San Mateo County, California. “But when users transfer their cryptocurrency, in an irreversible transaction, they receive nothing back.”

The scam also uses the names and images of other tech celebrities, including Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, according to the suit.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-23/steve-wozniak-sues-youtube-over-twitter-like-bitcoin-scam

Steve W. is not the first high profile personalities that sue Youtube over this scam. Brad Garlinghouse of XRP, https://fortune.com/2020/04/21/ripple-sues-youtube-scam-videos-crypto-garlinghouse/.

I think Youtube should step up and better police their service with this rampant fake giveaways promoted on their platform. It's about time, specially on what had happen to Twitter in recent days.

I've seen verified Youtube accounts getting hacked, renamed and used to impersonate Binance with a live stream about a 'giveaway'. When I saw it months ago, I've contacted Binance and filed a complaint with Youtube. The streams continued for a couple of days before Youtube or someone sorted it out. That's a long time IMO. But months of fake Steve Wozniak is way longer, so I understand the wish to sue Youtube. I am pretty sure, however, that Youtube is not responsible for impersonation attacks and will win the lawsuit. They have too many videos to pay attention to things like this.

[jpnl0006]

i do not necessarily consider the the suit. Although loads of people and projects have been upto false giveaways but i think Steven Wozniak should pay deaf ears to what comes out of people who decide not to keep their dignity and integrity by living up to their expectations. Its really not worth the stress although it will serve as a deterant.

[Yaunfitda]

i do not necessarily consider the the suit. Although loads of people and projects have been upto false giveaways but i think Steven Wozniak should pay deaf ears to what comes out of people who decide not to keep their dignity and integrity by living up to their expectations. Its really not worth the stress although it will serve as a deterant.

For obvious reasons, Steve is feed up with those fake giveaways using his name and I presume that many people are asking him about this so he got stress and file this case against Youtube. This is no longer secret, they have been taken advantage of scammers thru Youtube and they need to stop this from happening. Or at least be quick on their response from reports as we have experience that it takes days and months before they finally shut down those fake giveaways.

[meanwords]

i do not necessarily consider the the suit. Although loads of people and projects have been upto false giveaways but i think Steven Wozniak should pay deaf ears to what comes out of people who decide not to keep their dignity and integrity by living up to their expectations. Its really not worth the stress although it will serve as a deterant.

I think he doesn't really care what others say to him personally about this but I think what he cares about is his reputation that is being tarnished because of those scammers using his name for fake giveaways. Rumors and sayings are a bad way to do it and having him not knowing what really is going on, he won't be able to prevent it as people will have their impressions on him in a bad way.

I've researched a little bit and I think he has a slim chance to win this. Though Youtube would be losing money and time too because of this.

[UserU]

For obvious reasons, Steve is feed up with those fake giveaways using his name and I presume that many people are asking him about this so he got stress and file this case against Youtube. This is no longer secret, they have been taken advantage of scammers thru Youtube and they need to stop this from happening. Or at least be quick on their response from reports as we have experience that it takes days and months before they finally shut down those fake giveaways.

Vitalik (founder of ETH) was so fed up at one point he did this

[stompix]

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Unless their AI had a facial representation of Steve Wozniak's face then automating reporting of such videos is very difficult since if it's not written to intake "clues" from the video to determine who, if it's an influential person, is featured in the video it can't tell the difference between "Steve Wozniak making a promotion" and "a person making a promotion".

Oh, I should have explained better what I was implying.
Yeah, I wasn't really talking about youtube flagging every video in which Wozniak appears as that would trigger hundreds if not thousands of false reports, but if they did find a video for a fake giveaway and deleted it they should have already learned that certain videos with that particular scene are used for this kind of scams and put videos like that on a shortlist, whenever a scam report goes in it should have had top priority.

After all, we're talking about alphabet here, they have a lot of tracking algorithms for all their products, I'm pretty sure they have the means to discover pretty rapidly videos that are used in scams, the problem is that in their quest for $ the first and only step being done automatically is about demonetization or removing sound, the video is still on and so it begins the long wait for human intervention by an operator, which as we can see takes a long, long, time while people are getting scammed.

[audaciousbeing]

It's good that he is suing YouTube though but the real issue is that what will be the outcome for it?

1. He is a public figure that anyone could have access to his portrait to perpetuate such atrocities. Which means nothing

2. Does YouTube claim responsibility for all contents uploaded on its platform which I know that the only reason that they take down videos is either it outrightly failed their policy or it's reported. Now that he is suing, then he is putting them on their toes to be stricter in their policy.

[Yaunfitda]

It's good that he is suing YouTube though but the real issue is that what will be the outcome for it?

1. He is a public figure that anyone could have access to his portrait to perpetuate such atrocities. Which means nothing

It means' everything, his images are being used to perpetuate crimes with Youtube as their platforms.

2. Does YouTube claim responsibility for all contents uploaded on its platform which I know that the only reason that they take down videos is either it outrightly failed their policy or it's reported. Now that he is suing, then he is putting them on their toes to be stricter in their policy.

Of course they should claim responsibility on everything being posted on their platform. So definitely they need to have a tougher policy about this one. If they haven't noticed, fake giveaways on their backyard are rampant and scammers and criminals are thanking them for that relax policy.

[n0ne]

Another thing openly he's doing it through the live streaming on the YouTube. With the chat box disabled for the video itself show how they're scamming the people. Newcomers to the cryptocurrency will easy get turned to be a prey, because the way this has been happening around is simply flawless. Just send based on the requirement. Also more people keeps watching. I saw more than 5k people watching the video.

[thesmallgod]

Giveaway ads on YouTube has not stopped and people are still fallen for it. This mean one thing, YouTube don't review well the ads before it is being accepted. It is a bad news for YouTube because they are being careless and make people lose money recklessly. Who would have thought ads on YouTube are published by scammers.

[Fundamentals Of]

For obvious reasons, Steve is feed up with those fake giveaways using his name and I presume that many people are asking him about this so he got stress and file this case against Youtube. This is no longer secret, they have been taken advantage of scammers thru Youtube and they need to stop this from happening. Or at least be quick on their response from reports as we have experience that it takes days and months before they finally shut down those fake giveaways.

Vitalik (founder of ETH) was so fed up at one point he did this

It seems the users are now the ones trying to make ways to keep the rest from falling victim to countless scam giveaways. This is not unique to Vitalik Buterin as far as I know. I have seen other official accounts of top crypto personalities and crypto projects giving reminders that they are not actually giving away coins.

This kind of scam is not just found on Youtube. It is everywhere online. Youtube, social media sites, Google, etc should start taking this problem very seriously now. Large amounts of money must have been stolen due to these scams. It is just right that there should be a legal action. 

[UserU]

It seems the users are now the ones trying to make ways to keep the rest from falling victim to countless scam giveaways. This is not unique to Vitalik Buterin as far as I know. I have seen other official accounts of top crypto personalities and crypto projects giving reminders that they are not actually giving away coins.

This kind of scam is not just found on Youtube. It is everywhere online. Youtube, social media sites, Google, etc should start taking this problem very seriously now. Large amounts of money must have been stolen due to these scams. It is just right that there should be a legal action. 

Most don't bother because people still fall for them even after warning them. But those sites with verified tags are more convincing because of the trust factor.

Using the same Vitalik example above, if a hacked verified account impersonates him, no doubt at least a handful would still fall victim, even with another handle, let's say @VitaIikButerin.

[Artemis3]

I think Youtube should step up and better police their service with this rampant fake giveaways promoted on their platform. It's about time, specially on what had happen to Twitter in recent days.

Well youtube is trigger happy for copyright infractions, infamously triggering several false positives; and yet they let those (stupid) scams using the names of famous people go on unmolested. They should all band together and sue Google the way they deserve it.

[pawanjain]

I would have done the same thing if I were him. Considering the recent twitter hack and the amount people have lost it is better to report any such scams and Steve has done the right thing because it's youtube who has to figure out a way to stop people from promoting such scams which leads to huge losses to people. I am pretty impressed that Steve has taken a step at least because celebs don't generally do that.