Got a direct message from a top YouTuber? Chances are, it’s phishing

[harlan4096]

Are you subscribed to a top YouTuber’s channel? If so, at any moment, a message purporting to be from your preferred celebrity can land in your inbox.

At first glance, the text looks like amazing news. Your fancied YouTube star feels extremely grateful to you for being one of their subscribers or for leaving comments on their video. And you’ve been chosen at random either to participate in a giveaway or to directly get a valuable prize — a new iPhone X or a gift card, for example.

The problem is that the message is fake. It’s part of a brand new scam targeting YouTube users that the streaming service has yet to figure out how to fight.

How does this YouTube scam work?

The scheme is relatively simple. First, the scammers set up a new YouTube account and change the avatar and displayed channel name to make them identical to those of a famous YouTuber. They exploit a standard YouTube feature that allows users to display any [i]channel[/i] name, no matter what their [i]account[/i] name is.

After that, the imposters send out friend requests en masse — a friend request within YouTube can be sent to anyone on the platform. The fraudsters do not even need to upload any content to the fake account to make these requests look legitimate; the requests contain very little information other than the displayed name and avatar image. Many fans accept the request without giving it a second thought.

Full reading: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/youtube-p...cam/25600/