Looks like more YouTube accounts of all different flavours are facing some crypto-scam trouble, most notably McCreamy.
McCreamy is a New Zealand-based gaming YouTuber with almost 8 million subscribers, best known for his gaming and comedy videos, mostly relating to Fortnite. Yesterday, McCreamy tweeted out that his YouTube account had been hacked, tagging Team YouTube for assistance.
@YouTubeGaming @YouTube someone fucking help please
— McCreamy (@McCreamy) May 22, 2022
Instead of McCreamy’s account coming up on YouTube, users would see ‘Tesla Live’, and a single livestream of a Bitcoin-related discussion between Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Cathie Wood and Steve Lee. The only thing is, it’s not just McCreamy’s account that this has happened to, as just last year we reported on Digital Foundry dealing with the exact same thing. But wait, there’s more!
Going through YouTube’s ‘live’ category and simply searching ‘Elon Musk’ produces many, many, many channels all streaming that exact same discussion. Some of these channels have had their names and profile pictures changed, some of them have only had their names changed, and some have had none of this happen and are just playing the livestream on an account that clearly has no interest in Musky or Bitcoin.
Some of these channels have thousands of subscribers, and some of them only have hundreds. Some of them are posting semi-regularly, and some of them have laid dormant for years. With the channels that do still have content available (many of them, including McCreamy, simply had their channel’s content wiped or fully privated), you can see that their content pretty much has nothing to do with the livestream.
What we could see here as well is that with the channels that did have their account names changed, they were either something along the lines of Tesla, like Tesla INC, Tesla [LIVE] or in McCreamy’s case, simply Tesla Live. Another variation, however, is ARK Invest, which is the investment company that hosted this discussion back in July 2021.
While McCreamy seems to be the largest YouTube channel to be hacked by these scammers, he’s definitely not the first. Most recently, NME reported in May that the YouTube channel for AOMG, a South Korean record label, had this exact same thing happen with the exact same livestream being played. Previously, Dexerto reported that the YouTube account of Reckful, a Twitch streamer who passed away in July 2020, was hacked and also used to livestream a bitcoin scam in April.
This same thing also happened to another gaming YouTuber known as Vermax, who luckily was able to get his account back and made a video explaining what happened to him.
As of writing, it looks like McCreamy’s account has been returned to him, as the profile photo and name have been changed back and his original description and links to his social media have returned. Considering this has been happening for quite a while now on YouTube, as well as the countless crypto-scam hacks of celebrity accounts on Twitter, you’d think that these big companies would find some way to combat this by now!
Kotaku Australia has reached out to YouTube for comment and will update this piece if/when we hear back.
Leave a Reply