I’ve noticed recently that the "free ADA"scam is still on the tube. I also saw one for another coin the was exactly the same. I “flagged” both of them, the ADA one first. About a week later I saw the second one and flagged it.
I think we all should flag these scams to get YouTube to take them down - put enough pressure to make the do it.
What do you think?
Hello @PeeGee
We been flagging them and reporting to YouTube for videos and Google for phishing websites. I reported 100’s myself. We also ran LIVE YouTube videos at the same time when we see them post their scam videos to warn people that they are scams. But YouTube flags our videos because they don’t have enough views/ likes or subscribers.
Problem is that scammers hijack channels of legitimate YouTubers with 100k or more subscribers and 100s of well liked videos, so reporting/ disliking scam video becomes very small part of calculation for their algorithm.
YouTube needs to start scanning for “out of character” videos from their larger YouTubers and temporally freeze accounts or post a warning over a video saying “Unusual activity detected” when they see comments are suddenly turned off and channel name changes to scam words.
What seems to be the most effective is reporting scam websites and YouTube videos to Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau at : Jira Service Management
and report websites to Google Phishing report pages at:
Report a Phishing Page
Here are some things I tried so far that didn’t work all that well:
I posted clips of Charles (like scammers do) except I added giveaway scam warnings and used only clips that talk about scams. I LIVE streamed them for hours. I got some dislikes and YouTube shut down my streams:
Posted a short clip on twitter and tried to spread the message. Reached less then 200 people:
i dedicated a page on my website to warning about and teaching how to report these scams. I got less then 4k views on that site since May. Scammers get 40k views in 1 day.
So I think education gap about Cardano (and crypto in general) is too wide to bridge with just warnings and reports. We need a mass education platform to get newcomers to put effort in learning the basics of security while they are learning basics about crypto. However, that’s not gonna happen until we have near seamless UI experience going from fiat to crypto… and that seems just so, so far away. Lets hope that 2022 brings good news to this front! 
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I have flagged more than 50, could be 80 by now. It doesn’t take long before they reappear and show a new url. Tjåha last one was called adapump.org if memory serves. Ada, Solana, cro and more. The latest trend is to use ads which you can’t flag, not on Apple TV anyway. The ad wants you to download something, maybe some fond of ”add—in”. The ad claims that you can get a free nft of you follow the instructions.
I wish youtube could use ai to spot these videos.
It is likely fake viewers, the scammers pay someone that creates loads of followers. The same trick is used elsewhere like Telegram. I saw this video where an experienced trader wanted to ise an exchange but failed to understand how it worked. Had he clicked on ”Settle” it would have worked. So he called what turned out to be a fake support on Telegram. They sent him some program to download, claiming it was on upgrade pr somilar which seemed resonable. He ran it and lost $30k. That’s a lot of money.
The scam site had more followers than the real support, all of them fake. Be careful, these pepople are everywhere.
Wow! glad to see lots of Cardonians are doing this. Has anyone tried to contact Google/utube? Especially from the Cardano team?
I’m not on the Cardano team but I have done some research. The best I can hope for is to become what is known as a trusted flagger. It means that what you flag will have higher priority.
I was watching some crypto related channels and youtube recommended me a scam livestream on the top of the feed.
SCAM
hps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFxtXSvJv5U
SCAM
hps://adatoday.net/
SCAM
Seems to relay a genuine livestream with overlays of text with a link to a scam site.
Also a link in description to a scam.
It seems like this video have been live for 4 days now rolling the scam over and over.
As I’m writing this, there is about 4000 people watching this scam live stream.
The channel is from 2006 I’m surprised it’s not banned.
Another channel running the same scam.
SCAM
h**ps://youtu.be/NRO95AO8Owc
SCAM
The channels are named “Cardano” and “Cardano ADA” both registered in 2006.
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I suspect that the number of followers is fake. I think these people pay someone so that infected computers appear to be watching. Someone told a story about how he was fooled by a reddit fake support. The fake site had more followers than the real support. These numbers mean nothing if scammers are behind
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Why doesn’t Charles run a banner that says Giveaways Are a Scam under all his videos???
It’s bad enough that he’s ignored millions of coins being stolen and refused to void the transactions, burn the coins and refund the victims!!
How would that help? They can just post a banner over his banner saying " GIVEAWAY NOW!" or something like that.
Also, it’s not his responsibility to police the internet and chase scammers. Fraud is a crime and people need to start reporting this to local police/ fraud authority and contacting YouTube with police file numbers if anything is going to change.
Charles has not ignored that Ada has been stolen, he has made videos about it, with cryptocurrency you are the the bank, it’s your responsiblity to do your own research.
This is something you should do before you buy any cryptocurrency of any kind. I bought a hardware wallet before I bought anything.
I think it’s great I am not the only one reporting them, it’s a lot more wait when it comes with documentation and an abusedepartment@cardano.org email header. I have recommended this site implement a report button on the main page and a dedicated abuse department for mitigating all impersonation and fraudulent reports.All these could and should be tracked and sent to FBI on a weekly basis as well from Cardano Abuse department. An established dedicated department is necessary and every major company has em. I was surprised when I first try to find how to help on the Cardano page no such implementation had been put in place yet. I hope they do fix this and help us help them better. We can report but we do not have the credentials to make as much as a dent as this would, coming from someone whos worked this department in IT, once you friend other departments of major networks and they understand when you send something it holds weight, things do get better and results faster.Like Cardano its all about networking, where is the Abuse Block Chain to improve abuse department in general, maybe can take up that as a project. There is always money in securities and fraud protection.
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