Youtube helps scammers steal $130,000 in Bitcoin from investors. A report on July 10th details that cyber-thieves find it very easy to trick their bitcoin ( BTC) people because their schemes have become genuinely professional and aggresive.
One particularly successful scam made over $130,000 in a day “with nothing more than a one page website, a bitcoin address and a decent amount of Youtube advertising.”
Another pocketed more than $1.5 million over six months by promoting a fake digital assets exchange with an “amateurish website riddled with spelling errors.”
Whale Alert claims that using their new blockchain crime monitoring, tracking and analysis platform, Scam Alert, it has gathered and analyzed “hundreds of thousands” of data from newspapers, blogs, and bitcoin addresses.
According to the report, scammers made off with $38 million worth of BTC in the last four years, excluding Ponzi schemes. By the end of 2020, Whale Alert estimates that scammers will make $50 million in annual revenue – a 2,000% increase since 2017.
There are dozens of different types of scams such as sextortions, fake exchanges, fake initial coin offerings, bitcoin recovery and video scams. But the most prominent type of scam at the moment is the giveaway, said Whale Alert.
The giveaway scam uses the identities of celebrities like Elon Musk or a well known exchange to lure people into sending their bitcoin, with help from Youtube advertising. Such schemes can net between a few thousand and $300,000 “depending on the skill and effort put in by the scammers.”
