Elon Musk Bitcoin scam resurfaces on hacked Esport YouTube channel

Sahana Kiran
Bitcoin
Source – Unsplash

The crypto community isn’t new to scams and hacks. While this has been increasingly common, the repercussions that follow suit aren’t. Video streaming platform, YouTube has been a prominent medium that advertises these scams. Time and again, Elon Musk endorsing Bitcoin or other projects has been surfacing on the application. This notion seemed to be persistent even after Musk took Twitter.

A prominent esports tournament series platform, Valorant Champions Tour’s official YouTube channel succumbed to a hack. After gaining access to the channel, the hacker or hackers decided to stream a fake video of Elon Musk.

In addition to this, all the other videos on the channel were deleted.

YouTube has garnered immense backlash for allowing these scams to occur and failing to take them down. While the platform was previously sued by Ripple as well as Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, YouTube got away with an easy win. According to a Californian judge, YouTube cannot be held liable for the material that is posted on its site.

Several took to Twitter and pointed out how there were more scams under his name.

A few others on Twitter urged Musk to buy YouTube as well. Following Musk’s $44 billion Twitter purchase, netizens were seen pushing the Tesla CEO to make various other purchases.

Will YouTube ever address these crypto scams?

As Bitcoin remains stagnant at $20K, scams surrounding the king coin continue to take the front stage. It was brought to light that in the first part of this year, the frequency of cryptocurrency frauds employing fake domains, which are utilized as welcome pages for YouTube fraud streams, surged.

A report by Group-IB pointed out that this metric witnessed a 335 percent surge during the first half of 2022. The report further read,

“Scams aimed at crypto-enthusiasts are getting more prevalent, and their breadth and sophistication are expanding.”