In the course of the extremely anticipated launch of Apple’s iPhone 16 on September 9, scammers flooded YouTube with dwell streams that featured AI-generated variations of Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner.
These streams have been used to advertise crypto scams, deceiving viewers into considering they might double their cash by sending crypto to a fraudulent deal with.
One of many rip-off streams, shared on X (previously often known as Twitter), featured deepfakes of Tim Prepare dinner encouraging viewers to ship Tether (USDT), Bitcoin (BTC), and Ether (ETH) to a so-called “contribution deal with.”
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The pretend Prepare dinner assured viewers that Apple would ship again double the quantity of cryptocurrency they deposited. Nonetheless, in actuality, the scammers stole the funds.
One notably convincing pretend stream was hosted on a YouTube channel that gave the impression to be affiliated with Apple and had a verification checkmark, making it extra plausible to viewers.
Screenshots and movies shared on X revealed that a few of these rip-off streams amassed lots of of 1000’s of views. Nonetheless, it is suspected that many of those views have been generated by bots.
YouTube’s assist crew shortly acknowledged the problem, posting on X to induce customers to report any fraudulent movies. As of now, the pretend dwell streams have been faraway from YouTube, and the accounts related to these scams have been shut down.
These streams came about throughout Apple’s official “Glowtime” occasion that was live-streamed on YouTube, the place the corporate revealed its newest iPhone 16 fashions.
This incident highlights the growing use of deepfake know-how by scammers, who at the moment are focusing on high-profile figures and occasions to make their schemes extra convincing.
This isn’t the primary time such scams have surfaced; again in June, deepfake movies of Elon Musk selling the same crypto scheme appeared on YouTube across the time of SpaceX’s Starship rocket launch.
Gode is a Web3 Market Analyst who researches crucial business occasions and interprets how they have an effect on the broader Web3 house. Her formal training in media tradition & digital rhetoric permits her to make use of a methodical method to evaluating important Web3 information knowledge, together with large-scale occasions and the broader social sentiment throughout the ecosystem.Gode is a mutilingual skilled, having studied in a number of universities all throughout Europe. This enables her to have a one-of-a-kind alternative to investigate Web3 social sentiments spanning totally different cultures and languages and, in flip, develop a a lot deeper understanding of how the Web3 house is rising inside totally different communities. With the remainder of her crew, Gode works to establish essential crypto information patterns and supply unbiased and data-driven data.Gode’s passions embody working and speaking with individuals, and when she’s not researching Web3 information, she spends her time touring and watching true crime documentaries.
