For YouTube creators, getting hacked by scammers is ‘traumatizing’

Nearly a year after his YouTube channel was hacked by crypto fraudsters, Steve still thinks about the ordeal every day. “I’m afraid to leave my browser open,” he says.

Steve and his wife Danielle (who is withholding their last name for privacy reasons) launched Vegas Action in 2020, chronicling their wins and losses playing poker and blackjack in Sin City casinos. The couple wanted to emphasize their love for Vegas while showing the reality of the game (i.e. the house always wins).

The channel was showing steady growth until it was hacked in April, after which it was shut down by YouTube. After numerous appeals to Google, which owns YouTube, the channel was finally returned to Steve and Danielle’s control a month later. But at this point, it was losing subscribers and losing momentum. Now at 37,000 subscribers, Steve and Danielle were hoping that at this point they would be north of 50,000.

“Our undergrowth is now 30 percent of what it was a year ago,” Steve says. “We are struggling and trying to hang on and be positive.”

As for the hack itself, Danielle calls it “traumatic.”

Discover the hack

Scammers took control of the channel by posing as potential Vegas Action advertisers. Specifically, they claimed to represent the popular translation service Duolingo.

“Some of our viewers come from other countries,” says Danielle. “There are people watching who don’t speak English. It seemed like a great opportunity.”

“We were thinking about working with an advertiser to do an integration,” says Steve. “We hadn’t done one in a long time, so we said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it. We need additional revenue. This will help us pay for plane tickets and other expenses.’ I was having issues with them, and I clicked on something I shouldn’t have, and it took over.”

Shortly after, the scammers took control of the email account Danielle was using for the channel.

“[The scammers] I couldn’t do anything until I logged into email, and then they got my password,” says Danielle, who used two-factor authentication to log in. “They changed some things. We noticed it within an hour and took the email back, but they had become parents to my email. So no matter what, they could get in. »

In addition to realizing their email had been hacked, the couple soon learned they couldn’t log into their YouTube channel.

“We notified YouTube that we had been hacked,” says Steve. “By live chat, of course, because we couldn’t find a real person to talk to.”

That night, the scammers completely took over Vegas Action and launched a live stream, offering cryptocurrencies to Steve and Danielle’s tens of thousands of subscribers. Shortly after the live stream launched, YouTube shut down the channel completely, making it impossible to find even through search.

Steve and Danielle were devastated and tried to spread the message to their followers via social media. While the deletion of the channel stretched over several days, even weeks, without any news from Google, the couple launched a new channel, but much of the damage had been done.

Bring the channel back online

The couple filed help tickets and sent emails to Google’s feedback address, but only received automated responses. While talking to other gambling creators, Steve and Danielle discovered that several of them had also been hacked by Duolingo copycats, but regained control of their channels after about a week.

They contacted Brian Christopher, a video game YouTuber with over 750,000 subscribers. Shortly after contacting Christopher, YouTube returned the channel to its control, without any explanation.

Steve and Danielle believe that Christopher told his contact at Google about the Vegas Action hack, which may have accelerated the channel’s comeback.

“If you’re a big channel on YouTube, just like if you’re a big casino player, you get a [human] host,” Steve said.

Boot Bullwinkle, head of political communications at Google, tells Mashable that YouTube doesn’t set a specific subscriber minimum to access human contact. It asks hacked creators to immediately visit this Google page to report the issue and chat with an AI assistant (Steve says they contacted the digital assistant but never received anything useful).

Steve and Danielle have no idea who took over their channel. Bullwinkle declined to say how many YouTubers are hacked each year.

Advice for other creators

Steve and Danielle say they are always approached by potential advertisers who appear to be scammers. They have only entered into one ad partnership since the hack, with a company they have previously worked with.

“It kind of stopped us from doing [partnerships,] because we are afraid,” says Danielle.

The couple recommends using a new email address when starting a YouTube channel and being very careful not to click on anything, especially if it’s from an unknown person.

“Take note of email addresses,” says Danielle.

The consequences

After getting their channel back, Steve and Danielle resumed regular posting and increased their uploads to at least five per week. YouTube regularly tells its creators that consistency is key to growing your channel, according to Steve and Danielle, who noted that even missing a day of posting affects subscriber and view counts. Being offline for weeks was catastrophic for their growth, they say.

“We were down for a month, so some people go somewhere else and find other things to watch, other things to do, and they forget about you,” Danielle says.

“And there are so many new [gambling] “The chains make tables like us,” adds Steve. “They appear left and right.”

In the days leading up to their channel’s return, Steve and Daniel had long discussions.

“We talked about moving away [from the channel]because if we don’t get it back, how can we start from scratch? », says Danielle. “We invested so much money into it. For several years, it’s a huge loss because we gain nothing.”

Ten months after the hack, the Michigan-based couple remains committed to their channel and their subscribers. But the hack changed everything.

“We were seriously talking about moving to Vegas, maybe this year, before the hack,” Steve says. “Now those plans have simply disappeared.”