Phishing scams have been on the rise over the past decade, and according to this survey, an increasing number of people are also falling for it. YouTube, one of the most successful crowd-sourced content video content platform, has also been a target of scammers over the past few years.
A new phishing scam was reported by YouTuber Tesla Joy on Sunday, which is trying to trick YouTube content creators into sharing their account password.
According to YouTube’s monetisation rules, accounts that have more than1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months are eligible to monetise their content. If your account is monetised, beware of this phishing scam as it might target you too and even if you still haven’t reached a 1000 subscribers, be on the lookout for this email.
The scam email says that a violation has been detected in your account and it is being reviewed. It then asks for some information from the receiver including the channel’s password. You can read the content of the phishing email verbatim below.
The email from editor.monetized.channel@gmail.com reads:
“Hi,
Our team reviewed your channel carefully to evaluate your application. Thank you very much for your patience. We’ve detected more than one violation in the process of reviewing your account. We need more detailed analysis. Please note that we are controlling all youtube channels manually. In order to accelerate the process, please be sure to fill in the requested information. Please fill in the information and reply to this email.
Channel URL :
Channel Content Topic :
Copyright [Yes/No] :
Your Channel Password:-The YouTube Team”
If you’re looking for reasons why this is classified as a phishing scam, note the grammatical errors in the email and the fact that they’ve blatantly asked for the password in plain text in reply to this email — a company never asks for your passwords.
Phishing scams like these are aimed at retrieving crucial data — passwords in this case — that can be used to further the scammer’s agenda, such as running more phishing campaigns under your name to scam your followers.
ATTN: @YouTube creators @i1Tesla @LikeTeslaKim @tesla_raj @Model3Owners @BenSullins @marc_benton @TesLatino @Teslatunity (plz tag others you know of). I got this phishing email today from “editor.monetized.channel@gmail.com” asking for my password. DO NOT RESPOND & REPORT IT pic.twitter.com/GVWZ33YEMc
— Tesla Joy (@TeslaJoy) May 5, 2019
For more information on phishing scams and how to protect yourself against it, read our article here.
