In the video, the scammers urged to transfer crypto-assets to a specified address on the Binance Smart Chain network, promising that they would double any number of coins. Cryptocurrency analyst CryptoWhale reported on Twitter that BitBoy Crypto, Altcoin Buzz, Box Mining, Floyd Mayweather, Ivan on Tech and other channels were hit by hackers.
However, it seems that the cryptocurrency community is used to such scams and not many people lost their money. In total, just over 2 BNB and less than $200 in various tokens and stabelcoins were deposited into the wallet of the criminals. The scammers withdrew the BNB to another address, and the tokens remain on the wallet for now.
"Fortunately, we saw the fraudulent video on our channel and removed it within 2 minutes after it appeared. But even in that time some users managed to watch and comment on it," said Michael Gu, the owner of the Boxmining channel.
He stressed that the review found no trace of hacking on his computer or any viruses. Gu suggested that YouTube could be responsible for the hack because it has a two-factor authentication feature. In addition, Gu saw no sign-in to his account from a third-party IP address in his activity log.
A Reddit forum user nicknamed 9Oh8m8 suggested that hackers could have used SIM card swapping to bypass two-factor authentication. Last fall, Google reported that Russian-speaking hackers were using phishing emails to hack into YouTube accounts.