Bitcoin Scam on YouTube Disguised As Coinbase CEO AMA

A popular YouTube channel had been hacked and conducted a scam ask-me-anything (AMA) with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong intended for obtaining Bitcoin.

The stream, which had been running for 12 hours at press time on April 6, was a fraud, calling for users to send Bitcoin (BTC) payments with the promise of a non-existent 5,000 BTC giveaway.

Classic crypto scam returns

The Bitcoin YouTube scam disguised as Coinbase followed a similar pattern of the well-known Twitter con, where a spoof account is created to resemble a well-known crypto or celebrity figure. The figure in question wields a large amount of Bitcoin or Ether (ETH) and plans to give it away, and by sending some of your own cryptocurrency to a given address, victims are promised between two and ten times the amount in return.

This time, somebody had managed to break into an already established YouTube channel, TopTenz, which had 1.63 million subscribers. The channel was renamed as “CoinbasePRO English.”

The channel had been live-streaming the AMA using old, looped footage of Brian Armstrong replying to viewers’ questions.

The stream also featured a Bitcoin address and QR code, promising that any Bitcoin sent will immediately have double the amount returned. Of course, sending Bitcoin there resulted in nothing but losing coins.

Over $50,000 stolen…

According to the Blockchain block explorer, several addresses were promoted throughout the stream, with one receiving 0.44 BTC, and the other ones 2.548 BTC and 4.209 BTC respectively.

This makes a total amount of about 7.2 BTC stolen so far — with a value over $51,200 at the time of writing.

Now the most interesting question is how much Bitcoin the Coinbase scam has gained in total, as it had been live on YouTube for about 12 hours.