This will be a quick post. We have received a phishing mail to our info@lemmy.world mail address telling that they are “lemmy.world Security Team”, telling that they will “disconnect” your account from our instance. This is ofc, not us. Do not fall for it! The attached image is how the mail looks like.
~Lemmy World Team.
Well one of the best scam hunters on YouTube lost his account to a scam. So not really a waste of time, trying Lemmy.
That sounds so crazy, who was it? What happened?
Looks like he was tricked into deleting his own channel by someone masquerading as YouTube support. https://futurism.com/the-byte/youtube-channel-hunts-scammers-gets-scammed
I was curious too so I googled it:
https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/scam-baiter-jim-browning-bamboozled-by-scammers-into-deleting-his-own-youtube-channel/
From what I read, some scammer tricked him by impersonating YouTube Support and telling him he would lose all his adsense revenue, which prompted Browning to fall for it.
Yep that’s him, I can never remember his name.
It was Jim Browning, as another comment said. I can never remember his name more than Jim, so I settled for job description, as he is easy to find that way.
But others have been through it also, Linus Tech Tips, The Spiffing Britt and Atomic Shrimp are the other big ones I know of, but there is plenty more. Of those Atomic Shrimp is also a scam hunter like Jim, so it definitely shows that just because you are very familiar with what it looks like you aren’t immune too it.
I can’t remember if they all fell for the same or similar ones or if it was different ones, but that really doesn’t matter so much.
And what happend was Jim and LTT got tricked into deleting there channels. LTT by a fake sponsorship and Jim I don’t remember someone else said it was fake YouTube support.
Spiff had something of a similar thing happen but I don’t remember the means, and Atomic Shrimp I believe was a different typ of scam not related to YouTube.
But everyone got their channels back in the end.
There’s also variable levels of sophistication for scam messages based on the desired target. If you’re looking for a whole lot of people who don’t understand technology enough to see through your premise, you go with the generic “hello sir and/or madame I am hackor send gift cards or I will delet ur phone”.
If you’re after a very specific person who is well known to be privy to the normal red flags, you’re more likely to create a custom spear phishing campaign and mimic as closely as possible the format, lexicon, domain names, etc of something reputable to avoid setting off their BS detectors.
With that said, yeah there’s enough people on lemmy that this low-effort take is worth a shot
Atomic Shrimp did a video on how he fell for a spear phishing scam