YouTube crypto giveaway scams

I watch some live Fortnite on Twitch from time to time before falling asleep as I sometimes play with my son. Now I am a natural skeptic but I'm actually a little embarrassed to admit it, but a Twitch one of these scams actually had me for a few minutes. I don't own any crypto but it actually had me searching for the best way to get some bitcoin fast as I didn't want to miss out on this gift from Elon. If I actually owned any crypto I might have fallen for it fully, it was that good of a trick. It was so good I told some my wife the next day I saw one of the best scams in a while.

It was exactly as you described - with Elon Musk looking like he was "live" and the chat was busy and full of people saying "it worked for me. Thanks Elon!" type stuff. Even the channel had used ElonMusk in its name. I honestly thought I was just lucky and happened to catch a billionaire, who is also a known crypto supporter, being generous and trying to get more people into crypto as well by giving some away to the lucky few who caught him live.

What stopped me obviously is me not actually owning any crypto and not being able to get some instantly and without large fees, but also a few things that didn't feel right in the gut. Like the channel was something like "ElonMusk3239". I thought "surely Twitch would make sure the real one didn't need to have the 3,239th account with his name".

Also the website the link directed you to in the chat looked a little to simple and supposedly showing in real-time all the lucky people getting double along with all the crypto addresses - ALL without any sort of signup or verification, etc. You just submitted everything right there and boom you would get double back. Reminded me of those "free VBucks" website my son has come across before.

The final reality was when the channel got taken down while I was watching and another popped up within a minute in the Live Chat area again but with another ElonMuskxxxx name. Then that would get taken down and again another popped up. That is when I realized Twitch was currently in a battle with some group trying to scam crypto.

Definitely one of the most realistic looking scams I've seen in a while.

You will send 0.000000000001 btc. You receive 2btc. Fantastic deal!

Here's where the problem sits.

There's this list of 50 giveaway scam websites currently active: https://pastebin.com/raw/NmTQQq3C

Most of the sites in that list were found from these Youtube videos (discovered with the help of crowdsourced labor, thanks to Microlancer.io). Many of these websites were registered just recently.

It takes about 15 minutes of labor on average to complete the procedures (from a Proof-of-Concept) to archive and submit takedown requests for each of those. That's 15 minutes more per site than the author of this post wishes to allocate, uncompensated, at the present moment.

Link to a writeup on the Proof-of-concept: https://bitcointech.medium.com/eradicating-giveaway-scams-no...

Tomorrow there'll be a dozen or two new additional sites to add to this list. The day after, another dozen or two.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how to combat this problem?

Thanks for that tip.

Fun fact, they additionally try to prevent any text selection, right-clicking, or copy/paste chords. Pasting this in your devtools debugger restores all functionality:

    (function () {
     if (typeof document.body.style.MozUserSelect != "undefined") {
        document.body.style.MozUserSelect = "auto";
     }
     document.body.style.cursor = "default";
     document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEDOWN);
     document.onmousedown = double_mouse;
     document.oncontextmenu = function() {return true};
     document.onkeydown = function() {return true};
    })();

Also, the "transactions log" is literally all random numbers generated in the browser:

    function createTableItem() {
        let coin = randomInteger(0, 1) == 1 ? "BTC" : "ETH";
        let inputValue = coin == "BTC" ? randomInteger(0, 5) + "." + randomString(5, "123456789") : randomInteger(0, 20) + "." + randomString(5, "123456789");
        let outputValue = ++inputValue * 2;
        let fee = inputValue / 100000;
        let address = coin == "BTC" ? $("input[name=address_btc]").val() : $("input[name=address_eth]").val();

        let row = `
                ${randomString(25) + "..."}

                ${randomString(6, "123456789")}

                ${randomString(25) + "..."}
${address}

                
                ${address}
${randomString(25) + "..."}

                ${round(outputValue, 7)} ${coin}
${round(inputValue, 7)} ${coin}

                ${round(fee, 5)}

                Completed

            `;
        $(row).hide().prependTo(".transaction-content").fadeIn("slow");
        $('.transaction-item:eq(5)').remove();
    }

    createTableItem();
    createTableItem();
    createTableItem();
    createTableItem();
    createTableItem();
    setInterval(createTableItem, 8000);