Cardano YouTube Giveaway scam

fake hoskinson live broadcast with giveaway scam:

[Link removed by @napoles]

cheers
Kumar

PS going out soon - seem to get a rash of these Sat pm - perhaps someone there could trawl for them?

2 Likes

Hello @kumarbiswas,

Thanks for the warning, however, I have removed the link to avoid giving publicity to the video. You can report this type of scam to the Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau.

Greetings,
NƔpoles.

1 Like

I was caught by this scam and the only reason why this worked is that I believed I was watching a live stream at the time. If the link was even on the Cardano website I wouldnā€™t have believed it, but the live stream with Charles speaking threw me completely off guard and I literally didnā€™t think, and had ā€˜assumedā€™ it was working similar to a stock split that occurs in the share market, only you werenā€™t back in at half the buy price.

Iā€™ve lost all of my ADA (9,812 in total) and Iā€™m crushed. I canā€™t believe I was so stupid and basically greedy. I feel literally sick and canā€™t stop shaking. Iā€™ve never been scammed online before because Iā€™m usually so cautious and now this; of all scams, this is what got me. Sorry, Iā€™m just venting and feeling so stupid and sick right nowā€¦

1 Like

This is the first time I sent crypto. I all looked very legit.
I lost 2000 ADA on that same youtube presentation.

1 Like

Hi Arianne

So sorry to hear about this. It happened to me a few months ago. I was in a mess for a week.
This is down to YouTube because they must have the tech to detect Giveaway scams as soon as theyā€™re posted because Cardano has clearly signalled they never do giveaways.
There must be a tech solution based on querying new YT posts for ā€˜Cardanoā€™ ā€˜Adaā€™ then checking the vids for Giveaway texts and/or giveaway URLs but I donā€™t have the tech skills yet.
Do you? or do you know anyone who can tell us whether this is practical? Iā€™ve had to say goodbye to my cash and slowly start again but we should try and stop it happening to others,
I canā€™t believe thereā€™s no better solution than reporting the event to Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau AFTER it happens.

Hi CVD211

So sorry to hear about this. It happened to me a few months ago. I was in a mess for a week.
This is down to YouTube because they must have the tech to detect Giveaway scams as soon as theyā€™re posted because Cardano has clearly signalled they never do giveaways.
There must be a tech solution based on querying new YT posts for ā€˜Cardanoā€™ ā€˜Adaā€™ then checking the vids for Giveaway texts and/or giveaway URLs but I donā€™t have the tech skills yet.
Do you? or do you know anyone who can tell us whether this is practical? Iā€™ve had to say goodbye to my cash and slowly start again but we should try and stop it happening to others,
I canā€™t believe thereā€™s no better solution than reporting the event to Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau AFTER it happens.

Hi Kumar and thank you for your kind words and sorry that you have also gone through this. I do take full responsibility and blame myself for not just not thinking and actually looking into it closer. Iā€™m usually diligent with scams and virusā€™s but this is the first Iā€™ve come across mimicking a live stream. Again, it threw me as I thought thatā€™s what I was watching and as I wasnā€™t sure how much I had missed. I didnā€™t even listen, I just went straight into action wondering if and how much ADA was still available and had I just missed out in an amazing opportunity.

The only protection I can think that may help in the short term is for organizations, such as Cardano, to run a ticker at the bottom of their streams noting there are no giveaways in this instance, or running a date/time stamp so you know it is live at the time. Trying to implement any systematic ā€˜ā€˜find and blockā€™ā€™ program would be massive with so many variables. Iā€™m a systems analyst and when I think how long it takes to run some queries at work (up to 16 hours) I canā€™t begin to imagine running a query on every web page where the text could be anywhere in the body. How would you stop a web page that states ADA and Giveaway or ADA and Free etc. It could even just be another site reporting on these types of cases or stating that ADA doesnā€™t do giveaways or the words donā€™t even relate at all etcā€¦ Arghā€¦ I think from a YouTube perspective, it is either a ticker system, backdrop, timestamp, etcā€¦ Whoever does come up with a solution will make a lot of money from it, that I do know! LOL

1 Like

Hi DVD211,

Sorry to hear you were caught also. Itā€™s scary now that hackers have moved into the YouTube/Livestream space (maybe theyā€™ve always been there but Iā€™m not online enough to notice them). Iā€™ve learnt my lesson now though and never again will I be sending my crypto anywhere except to my wallet or to trade. This has even turned me away from staking which I currently do with other tokens. Now Iā€™m not so sureā€¦

Thanks for getting back to me Arianne,

I worked as a SAP ABAP developer and only realised when I left last year how insulated that ERP world is from current system complexities.

Maybe Cardano doesnā€™t want to ā€˜watermarkā€™ their videos with anti-scam warnings because they donā€™t want to subliminally deter wary new investors.

I donā€™t often watch Youtube Crypto videos but a couple of Saturday nights ago I did and was amazed to see a dozen Cardano giveaway scams operating in a single evening. I flagged them on YouTube, reported them to Cardano and 9 of them were closed by the end of the night.

My idea is to tune up the manual process I used and then get a crowd to do the same thing. If I could manually find a dozen in a night then a crowd could find many more.

Once we have the process down we havew made a start. Then we could find bits of the process to automate.

I am new to this type of development and used to the fact that development is usually more complex than anticipated but Iā€™ve nothing to lose but time and plenty to learn in that time.

My manual searches were simply for Cardano or ADA - then I could look down the list, see ā€œlive streamsā€ and check them. The searches came back quickly and a human looking at the list is currently the fastest solutionā€¦ but there are interesting possibilities including ai, which I spent a couple of weeks on at uni in the 90ā€™s but have since had no experience with.

As you say the difficulty is to distinguish scam sites from sites warning of scams but if we feed them to
Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau - https://iohk.link/CFDB it should at least help.

Thousands of people have been painfully scammed. If a couple of hundred give two hours a week it canā€™t harm anything and we might discover a solution.

What do you think?

Cheers

Kumar

I think I caught that live stream.
When I saw on the side ā€œsend x amount of Ada to ā€˜addressā€™ to receive x amount of adaā€ I thought something was off.
Then when I seen they were only accepting 1000 ada as minimum send, I knew it was a fluke.
Good catch OP

1 Like

Hi guys,
I got scammed by YT Cardano Giveaway. Usually I am very cautious when it comes to online transactions but today I fell into the trap. I lost 58000 ADA tokens worth of $88000. Itā€™s my entire fault but Iā€™d appreciate it if the Cardano Foundation can help me recover my tokens.
I will attach one screenshot as a new user.
Thanks

Happened to me last week, this network is worthless if these transactions canā€™t be voided and refunded. I have a start-up choosing which platform to build on and this is extremely negative for my team, not to mention global adoption. Itā€™s fundamentally very broken if you refunds are ā€œimpossibleā€ because ā€œit sucks to be youā€ No REAL business should operate this way!

ooooooo my god sooo much ada coinz what went on my friend in your head to send out a such big amount of ada pfffffff cant believe this man how many times our guru charles has warned us about this bullshit ā€œthere is no free adaā€ in this world even now i feel you pain inside of mešŸ˜” there is no refund button in the wallet and no timelock for transactions going out.
do know what to say moreā€‹:man_shrugging::man_facepalming::man_facepalming:
iā€‹:pray: for you head up family&health first all other stuff you can make againā€‹:+1::+1::+1::+1:

i was dumb enought to do it. lost 3600ADA.
i did report it to police in ravensburg. also a guy that lost 20k ADA gave me his case number so i gave that to the inspector so that they can cooperate.
this is the wallet

addr1qxq6czzvtqczqusryq658sm8v5dl8j3jx8lzjcpvqjkd65etp05hdht7w6mxl37559wz775n48d5k4mftpv0d0jp85rsm6ezcn

I think I can improve your idea of watermarkingvideos. The problem is that the scammers would replace it with something of their own, like ā€Act nowā€.

What if Charles replaced one ofĆ„h his paintings with a poster saying ā€We donā€™t do giveawaysā€ or similar? That would be much harder to do anything about.

Unfortunately, I think it is difficult. Some of the scams claim that they will give away enough coins to buy 5 or more superyachts like this beauty:

And still, in spite of this, thatā€™s not what Charles, Michael Saylor or Cathie Woods is talking about. That was my reaction the first time I saw these videos. And the fact that if someone actually wanted to give away coins, they would simply ask for the receiving address.

I just lost about 38k of ADA just now after this scam. I was dumb enough to follow through with it. I guess there is no way of refunding is thereā€¦

No, if the scammers are not caught ā€¦ and youā€™re in a jurisdiction that gives you access to refunds from the caught scammers ā€¦ and they still have enough that can be confiscated, unfortunately not.

I did a whois on the videos that I found and flagged. They were all russian. Reg.ru seems to be popular. Mostly Micro Strategy and Cathie Wood. For some weord reason, there were no cardano scams.

May, 2024, theyā€™re still doing it.