Youtube Crypto Giveaway Scams Stand to Earn Up to $1 Billion/Year

I don't think there is any hope of the scam going away owing to it's huge profitability, but making these posts helps raise awareness and get the videos removed and news coverage.

Person #1 Michael Saylor videos:

https://www.whois.com/whois/msnews22.com

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qr04dpgjelt9kkc5r46vtprl5wxus8rrg9cxg3v

>4+ btc stolen in 4 hours

Person #2 Cathie Wood videos

https://www.whois.com/whois/ark-musk.com

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxapn6507ux4u39?page=2

>2 btc stolen in 12 hours

And another

https://www.whois.com/whois/btc-micro.org

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1DSvL1iTBVEux3XZGu37xoKQK6BhMLNwdA

Over 1BTC stolen in an hour

There are other videos and urls as well, but to list them all would be too time consuming. Some involving Vitalik Buterin, some involving Charles Hoskinson.

This is just a snapshot from a 12 hour period and the scam accumulated easily $300,000 between all the videos, URLs, and wallets. You can see how much $ is in the wallets, and how how over a period of many months it adds up to tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Unlike other frauds, it’s all open and transparent. You can see the videos and the wallet and determine how much it made.

This is what makes the situation so unacceptable. You can literally see the scams right out there in the public and YouTube has the power right now to remove the videos as soon as they go live, but refuse to. It’s not like it’s hidden in the dark net and you need Tor to access it. It’s right there on the platform. People complain about them on Reddit constantly but nothing changes. By the time the videos get removed, the scammers have made a fortune and new videos replace them, hundreds of these videos everyday, each making tens or hundreds or even million+ dollars. Simply removing the videos sooner would end the problem.

This is the most lucrative criminal enterprise I have ever seen or maybe ever existed.

These scammers combined are making anywhere from $500k-$1.5 million every single day, uninterrupted. That's about $300-400 million/year at $33,000 per bitcoin and $2300 per eth. If BTC, ADA, and ETH were to go back to record highs, it could conceivably be a $1 billion/year criminal enterprise just from YouTube crypto giveaway scams alone, which is equal to 5-10 major hacks in size.

The media think these giveaway scams are a joke or a curiosity or don’t even know they exist, compared to ‘real’ crime like ransomware, but half a billion dollars a year in revenue likely exceeds ransomware or any organized crime, short of drugs. Crypto is fucking huge…it’s bigger than entire countries. Even with the recent 50% selloff, total crypto market capitalization is around $1.6 trillion, which exceeds the size of the gambling industry worldwide ($92 billion) and the U.S. pharma industry ($500 billion). No amount of $ from online gambling , pills (like Viagra, steroids, etc.), or credit card offers comes close to this.

I wish I was joking but that is what the data shows (assuming the transactions are not fake, but I don't believe they are) revenue of at least $400 million/year at today’s crypto prices (although I am not sure how profitable it is, but I would guess it is very profitable given how persistent the scam is). It's not just a one-time thing. It goes on constantly, so many scam videos, websites, and wallets . So many victims , most of them are Coinbase users. They are people who may have a lot of retirement savings or disposable income and who started with crypto a year ago. I can understand why the scam is so persistent. Go find a crime that make $1 million everyday with no risk of jail time, unlike credit card or ID theft, ransomware, or drug trafficking.

Sad statement about humanity that this goes on, but not surprising either. Greed is not going away