Hackers Hijack 30 YouTube Accounts And Impersonate Bill Gates In Ponzi Scheme

One of the most popular types of scams that leverage cryptocurrencies as a method of collecting funds from victims is Ponzi schemes that impersonate famous people or companies from the tech industry.

This type of scam was first popularized on Twitter, where cyber-crooks impersonated the likes of US President Donald Trump, Tesla's founder and CEO Elon Musk, and cryptocurrency figures like the creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. After Twitter started to crack down on users posing as verified accounts, however, many of these scams moved to YouTube.

Recently, hackers hijacked more than 30 YouTube accounts in an elaborate scam that impersonated Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates. They were all broadcasting live streams and videos with thumbnails that featured a digitally altered photo of Bill Gates and a topic of ''Microsoft Bitcoin Investment News''. The video that they were live streaming was a startup talk that Bill Gates gave at a Village Global event in 2019.

Meanwhile, the scammers are asking users to participate in a bogus giveaway, where they would pay an entry fee of 0.1 BTC (worth $712 at the time of writing) for a chance of doubling their money.

To give the scam an air of legitimacy, most of the accounts that were targeted and hijacked had high subscriber counts. The YouTube channels were also renamed to appear as legitimate Microsoft brands such as Microsoft News, Microsoft US, and Microsoft Europe.

Considering the fact that some of the Bitcoin addresses that were involved in the scam had already received thousands of dollars at the time of writing, it is apparent that the scam managed to trick a few users. Based on the YouTube stats, the video feeds had reached tens of thousands of people.