Let me begin by saying that I know I’m an idiot. However, the psychological triggers these things act on are pretty well understood and everyone is vulnerable to them on some level. Saturday night I was watching YouTube ( sitting alone in your apt watch one of Musk’s JRE appearances is how to know you’ve “made it” in life). A recommendation for a live event popped up on my sidebar. It appeared to be Musk/ Jack Dorsey/ Cathy Wood all talking about crypto and the future. In the backdrop of this “Live event” there was an advertisement for a website, which is still up, however I’ve chosen not to link it as per Blind’s TOS. The premise was that in order to generate more interest in crypto they had a specific amount of BTC and ETH to giveaway to users. In order to receive some you just sent BTC to and address (they even had a handy QR code) and they’d send you back twice as much. I had ~0.035 BTC sitting in a wallet managed by the Cash app (just over 1k usd). The site had a live ticker so that you could see there giveaway fund being depleted. I felt a sense of urgency, scanned the QR code and sent my BTC. After about 10 minutes I felt a sinking pit in my stomach and the sting of embarrassment- I knew I’d been scammed. I contacted the automated support at Cash App/ Square inc. I indicated that I’d fallen for a scam. They replied “We can't reverse a Bitcoin transaction once it's completed. Follow these best practices to prevent this from happening in the future:” with some generic best practices. I flagged the “live event” on YouTube as being a scam. At the time I flagged it, the event hat ~7k viewers. The event was recycled footage of a conference form earlier with a background behind it that linked to the scam site. I inspected the channel - it was called “Tesla Official” or something similar. There were several videos hosted linking to other scams, all getting tons of views (tens of thousands in total). I filled a report with the FTC (https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/) with the details etc. I’m in a place in life where loosing the money doesn’t really affect my well being, and the main thing that hurts is the sting of embarrassment. I would point out that many of the victims are not in that circumstance and that the main factor that led me to not loose more money was just not having anymore in my wallet. It is disappointing to me that scam material like this is promoted via YouTube. My brain keeps thinking of solutions. They might involve some kind of automated scanning to search “live events” for recycled material, some kind of authentication process for live events, stricter authentication/KYC requirements to post videos so that a real person could be held accountable for perpetuating fraud, etc. Ultimately though, we are all responsible for our own well-being. Don’t believe things so easily, check in on your family and make sure they understand the risks as well. Tc 270k ===========update========== A few things: 1) The responsible party for what happened is the perpetrator(s) of the scam. While I can think of ways to improve the YouTube service, it’s not their fault that criminals are abusing their platform. 2) I have an autism spectrum disorder combined with a high personal risk tolerance. These factors put me at higher risk for this type of fraud than the average person. That said, if you can’t believe that you would ever fall vicim to something like this, you are wrong. These scams act upon well understood psychological triggers and all people are vulnerable on some level. An analysis of the BTC address that my funds were transferred to via Blockchain.com reveals that that it has received 3.54141514 BTC ($105,519.65 USD) over the past 7 days. I suspect much of it comes from people who were more harmed by their loss. People should be cautious when conducting any kind of online transaction, but don’t shame others or be ashamed yourself if you fall for something like this. 3) Technology Solutions for content platforms: Fist recognize that victory isn’t making running a scam impossible, it’s just adding enough challenge to make it unprofitable. The ideal solution likely relies on a multi-faceted approach that implements multiple safeguards, I’m spitballing a few below: 3.a) Automated approach to dealing with flagged videos. Computationally expensive tooling can be run on a video after a certain number of users/ percentage of viewers flag it. 3.b) Real-Time video analysis to detect duplicate footage. I’ve already begin looking into this usinf Microsoft’s project Rocket https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/live-video-analytics/. Think about the mechanics of the scam. The scammers must replay the same video over and over on loop as a live event. First, the service provider can scan for duplicate slides by taking a crc hash of each image frame. Any duplication where the exact frame is seen twice time lapsed apart is a clear indication of running on a loop and not being live. This is would be a clear violation of the TOS and the video and account could be temp-banned automatically . No AI/ML necessary for this, but it can be defeated fairly easily. Scammers can add small changes to each successive loop, such as a pixel etc. Instead of a traditional crc hash, we could use a two step hashing process first using a convolutional neural network to measure the number of image features, then secondly hashing this descriptor from step one. This will lead to duplicate detection even with edits applied to each loop. The two step approach I am describing here is similar to the NeuralHash function Apple is using to detect CSAM https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf. YouTube could also keep a database of CNN Hashes for images found in previous scam videos as well as any video with a certain number of views or containing certain characteristics (like having Elon, Chamath, Etc) to compare with live video. The key here is that live video should always be unique, never a full duplicate of something that’s been seen before. 3.c) Maintaining a blocklist of URLs/ associated text that lead to scams and OCRing video images for collisions with this list. 3.d) Automated live video authentication- for example before being able to steam a live video you could be asked to perform a task such as hold up three fingers on your right hand and then wave. These tasks could be randomized, and initially confirmed with AI tooling, only falling back to manual authentication when the AI route failed. Do you have any ideas on improving content platforms to make them more resilient to this type of thing? Please comment below.
Life lesson.
Damn! That is rough.
That’s a classic Elon scam
Sorry this happened, file a police report and use this loss as a tax deduction.
Had a client pull $3M out of his investment account we manage. About 10% of the account because he wanted to invest in crypto. We told him “we don’t advise this, but here are the risks. Make sure you use a reputable company like coinbase” He fell for a scam for someone promising to get him better returns. In the end he lost the $3M. He comminuted with the person via WhatsApp and never talked to anyone.
Whoa
was it a charismatic Korean man promising 20% annual return
I came accross that channel, they hide their subscribers count and disable comments That's the first sign of scam.
Crying for 1K dollars?
OP is crying because they fell for scam
Next time. Just know that there is no free money out there. You gotta work or do something, easy or hard, to earn money.
That applies to anything crypto. Entire crypto gang is after easy “fiat” money.
Its been quite a while that am seeing those shady ads on porn websites. It is obvious that those 3 have nothing to do with whatever they try to sell you. It is just stolen footage. Also I am not surprised that youtube is not doing anything. A lot of the ads you see on the platform is for pure scams, and that is pretty obvious. Fake guru formations, chinese crap dropshipped for 20 times the price from alibaba, miracle product that detoxify your body by puting 2 pieces of toilet papers on your feet that become black , etc… Of course that youtube know that those are scams. But they share a % of the stolen money with the platform by buying ads, so it is allowed
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