Hacker Remix

YouTube is letting people being scammed

19 points by jebenois 6 hours ago | 25 comments

paranoidrobot 5 hours ago

The tweet does not explain what the scam is.

It would be useful if you could explain specifically what the scam is and how it operates.

jebenois 5 hours ago

This smart contract pretends to be an automated trading bot that exploits market slippage on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. It promises users easy profits, but in reality, it steals their funds.

The contract's code is intentionally confusing, making it look like it finds new liquidity pools and makes profitable trades. Instead, it generates a hidden address belonging to the scammer. When users interact with the start or withdrawal functions, believing they are trading or withdrawing profits, the contract simply transfers all funds to the scammer's address.

In short, this fake bot claims to make money through DeFi trading but ends up sending users' funds to the scammer's wallet.

zahlman 2 hours ago

I know barely anything about crypto and never got involved with it, but I've been getting and reporting these ads. It's obvious to me that they're scams simply because they promise absurdly sized arbitrages. While the value of crypto might be highly volatile and speculative, it beggars belief that any crypto market could have this size and type of inefficiency.

stevage 2 hours ago

The idea that there is any legal program you could download and run for free money should require and enormous level of skepticism.

jebenois 1 hour ago

Your parents that are older and watch youtube may be victims

jebenois 5 hours ago

Thank you for the kind feedback. I am not explaining it well and post too quickly because it makes me really sad.

jebenois 6 hours ago

Another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DxlpbQxUUo

jebenois 6 hours ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHdi74cqHrY

elmerfud 6 hours ago

Looking at this stuff I'm not sure how it's YouTube's responsibility to protect people from their own stupidity. I intentionally chose that word instead of ignorance because sometimes it's useful to educate the ignorant among us so they are no longer ignorant.

Something like this is simply people who are unscrupulous leveraging a communications platform that's position is it is open for people to post their own content. I for one don't want communications platforms, that bill themselves as open places to post content, to police people's speech as a matter of general course. There are exceptions but the general rule should be people should be allowed to communicate even if their communication is pyramid schemes, trying to sell you the Brooklyn bridge, get rich quick schemes, etc....

Some people need to learn the hard lesson and we need to stop bailing them out.

iueotnmunto 5 hours ago

If YouTube cannot police or moderate their own platform, then that's a problem they created for themselves.

'Sorry, moderating this content is something we cannot manage' is not an acceptable response, they are a trillion dollar company with access to tools which can be run at scale. Scam prevention is a cost center, which is presumably why they don't care, and that attitude needs regulation (as they'll never change on their own).

> Some people need to learn the hard lesson and we need to stop bailing them out.

I think the same can be said for large tech companies.

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago

> If YouTube cannot police or moderate their own platform, then that's a problem they created for themselves

If we had social consensus that crypto, or at least these sorts of crypto schemes, are a scam, sure. We don't. If YouTube is targeting teens with meth-making ads, that's a problem. This seems more ambiguous.

zahlman 2 hours ago

>If we had social consensus that crypto, or at least these sorts of crypto schemes, are a scam, sure. We don't.

Per the description in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41920331, "these sorts of crypto schemes" are nakedly fraudulent. We're not talking about a pump-and-dump being achieved by vague allusions. We're talking about too-good-to-be-true representations of arbitrage (i.e. essentially risk-free return resulting from a market inefficiency, which naturally disappears from any market as it's exploited) that are a cover for unauthorized transfer of funds caused by deceptive computer code. I'm pretty sure there's more than enough legal precedent to cover every aspect of that and make an open-and-shut case. (This is not legal advice, of course.)

iueotnmunto 2 hours ago

So youtube can throw their hands up in the air and say 'its legally ambiguous, therefore we'll take their money' and that's okay?

fhdsgbbcaA 2 hours ago

If it pleases the stock market, it’s okay.

stevage 2 hours ago

This is malware, plain and simple. It's not ambiguous.

zahlman 2 hours ago

Would you feel the same way about, for example, Gmail deciding to just drop all its spam-detection heuristics? Ads on Youtube are bad enough already when they're offering legitimate products that Google thinks I want (in reality, I want barely anything beyond the essentials). Even as someone who can easily recognize this sort of scam, it's incredibly obnoxious that I should even be exposed to it.

jebenois 5 hours ago

Times are hard, people are desperate. That money is going to bad actors most likely (China/Russia/North Korea hacker sponsored groups). So they are financing those..

jebenois 5 hours ago

What I mean is that it is always the same pattern, I could make a ML model to detect in a few hours... So if YT can't do it, that means they allow it.