YouTube Restores Access After Crypto Scammers Hijack Ranveer Allahbadia’s Channel to Trick Viewers

Two channels run by popular content creator Ranveer Allahbadia, popularly known as BeerBiceps, were allegedly hacked by crypto fraud-promoting miscreants. Allahbadia hosts interactive sessions with Indian celebrities, spiritual leaders, and politicians – having a collective subscriber base of over 12 million. According to the creator, both channels post the account breach became inaccessible to him. However, in the course of the process mentioned above, cybercriminals changed all the relevant logos and images with pictures of Elon Musk and Tesla and deleted all the videos published by the channels. Soon after, the fraudsters began promoting a crypto scam as well, by utilizing Allahbadia’s account.

YouTube has unblocked access to Allahbadia’s channels after the hack. Meanwhile, the hackers displayed crypto schemes claiming up to 200 percent returns. The hacker then streamed a livestream using the YouTube channel of Allahbadia, which carried photographs of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. A QR code on the screen took users to a fake Tesla website, if scanned. Going into the pocket of the participants, the site also had a sweepstakes worth $100 million (approximately Rs. 836 million), according to a report by Crypto.news.  Crypto scammers now use more sophisticated schemes to hook gullible users, the FBI said in a recent report. In the said case, the hacker also created a calculator enabling users to see how much they’d get in return for investing a certain amount in what seemed to be a donation for Trump’s presidential campaign.

“We embrace you to the official event from Elon Musk and Trump, this event was created in order to popularise cryptocurrency, to participate you need to send cryptocurrency to any wallet (BTC, ETH, DOGE, SOL) you see on the site, we will multiply the amount sent by two and return it to your wallet,” a message posted on the fake site created by hackers read.

Suspicions apparently earlier flagged by Allahbadia’s subscribers about suspicious activities on the account streamed on X (formerly Twitter) were notified.

Apparently, according to a report by Crypto.news, at one point, the streams of one of Allabadia’s hacked channels had gone past 149,000-at least several people risk having been scammed.

This is not the first time that such an incidence has happened. Deep fake videos of Apple CEO Tim Cook spamming YouTube for a crypto fraud scheme were viewed earlier this month.

Related