I was watching some crypto videos on youtube tonight and I started to get ads saying that Elon Musk was giving away free Bitcoin to help speed up adoption. It didn't sound completely implausible and I'm always up for a little free crypto so I made the mistake of clicking the ad.
It ended up taking me to what was made to look like a BBC article. Basically it said to send any amount of bitcoin to a certain bitcoin address and that they would send you back double. At this point I realized this was definitely a scam. They even said that if the transaction didn't work to try sending the bitcoin again. Anyway I saw several more variations of this same scam tonight including this one for Shiba.
I think what shocked me and why I decided to write a quick blog about this is I just didn't expect this type of scam to be running ads on Youtube. I figured they would screen stuff like this out. Anyway stay safe out on the interwebs.
Well that’s depressing! Thanks for sharing!
Yeah, really surprised that YouTube doesn't have good quality control of their ads. They seem to have no trouble censoring content that disagrees with the official narrative.
Yep you’re so right.
Such misleading presentations have been circulating on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter for a long, long time. It's just trying the ground ... whoever falls for that false promise, falls for everything. There are many people who deal with such scams - it matters a lot to identify and report to as many people as possible about that misleading information.