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Thousands of YouTube videos promote fraudulent investment schemes

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Thousands of YouTube videos promote fraudulent investment schemes

Infogypsies now collect alms via video.

Researchers from the cybersecurity company WithSecure discovered thousands of YouTube videos promoting USDT (Tether) cryptocurrency scams.

Hundreds of YouTube channels, some of which have high subscriber and view counts, have been found to post new videos daily. Some of these channels are verified YouTube accounts.

The scam network is believed to be composed of about 30 members who use Telegram to communicate and carry out transactions. The attackers have created many YouTube channels to increase the reach and engagement of fraudulent videos.



Screenshot of one of the scam videos

Cybercriminals use bots to create comments on videos to make them look believable – 125,362 comments were posted by 61,048 unique channels. In addition, the video descriptions had a unique search engine optimization (SEO) style that allowed them to trick YouTube’s search functionality.

Using data collection and analysis methods, the researchers found more than 700 URLs associated with fraudulent investment applications, but stated that there could be thousands of crypto wallets of attackers – the hashtag “#usdtmining” that the criminals left under the video contains more than 3900 similar videos.



Video under the hashtag “#usdtmining»

WithSecure was able to identify 900 victims and stated that victims lost more than $100,000 as a result of the scam between July and November 2022. According to experts, the scheme is aimed at cryptocurrency investors, and low-quality videos in various languages ​​without localization indicated “a rather opportunistic an approach”.



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www.securitylab.ru

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