Top YouTubers panic as scammers impersonate them in private messages Some of YouTube\u2019s most popular creators are being impersonated by scammers, who are targeting fans through direct messages on YouTube and Twitter with the promise of exclusive giveaways. News YouTuber Philip DeFranco opened up his Wednesday show with a warning to viewers, showing a screenshot of a YouTube message from an account with a similar name and profile picture, which claimed that the recipient had won a \u201crandom subscriber\u201d giveaway. \u201cHi, thanks for commenting on my videos!\u201d the message began. \u201cI am selecting a random user from my subscriber list for a surprise gift and you have just won it!\u201d Philip Defranco isn\u2019t the only popular YouTuber being impersonated, either; YouTubers such as MrBeast, Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, and James Charles are likewise being targeted with similar messages, each of which include a suspicious link that likely leads to malware. \u201cHey YouTube, I\u2019m pretty sure 97% of messages sent on YouTube are scammers impersonating big YouTubers,\u201d MrBeast said of the matter in a Tweet. \u201cPlease fix this or remove it. No one uses it, and it\u2019s screwing over lots of people.\u201d Hey @YouTube I\u2019m pretty sure 97% of messages sent on YouTube, are scammers impersonating big youtubers. Please fix this or remove it, no one uses it and it\u2019s screwing over lots of people. I get thousands of comments and tons of tweets about this every day. pic.twitter.com\/y5SY4S2yza \u2014 MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) January 20, 2019 YouTube has since responded to the debacle, claiming that they are currently enacting further safety measures to prevent such scams from taking advantage of users. \u201cWe\u2019re in the process of implementing additional measures to prevent impersonation like this,\u201d the company wrote via Twitter. \u201cIn the meantime, your subs can protect themselves by blocking any account that is spamming them.\u201d Thanks for reporting on this spam issue! We\u2019re in the process of implementing additional measures to prevent impersonation like this. In the meantime, your subs can protect themselves by blocking any account that is spamming them: https:\/\/t.co\/uieSAi4k7Z \u2014 Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) January 23, 2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Top YouTubers panic as scammers impersonate them in private messages Some of YouTube\u2019s most popular creators are being impersonated by scammers, who are targeting fans through direct messages on YouTube and Twitter with the promise of exclusive giveaways. News YouTuber Philip DeFranco opened up his Wednesday show with a warning to viewers, showing a screenshot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}