Be Careful: The YouTube Comment Section Has A Serious Scam Problem

YouTube is a place of immense global companionship. The marketplace of ideas that thrives in the online space has grown from a rudimentary place of quirky videos to a digital classroom and discussion forum that can show or teach viewers just about anything they might seek to find. YouTube sports an active daily viewership figure of roughly 122 million users, combining to watch 1 billion hours of video each day. The numbers are staggering, and the platform continues to grow in size.

But there's a dark side of YouTube that viewers can't ignore. While your favorite content creators might frequently add to their catalog and give you something new to watch and take entertainment from, both poster and viewer can often feel the effects of a widespread problem that infects much of the platform. This threat lingers down below the video box, spreading rapidly throughout the comments section. If left unchecked, scam comments can overrun a video and leave viewers hesitating to engage with the creator or fellow members of the audience. The scam comment problem that has run rampant on YouTube affects all of its users. Creators have a menace on their hands while viewers have to be careful with their engagement or risk falling victim to an information or financial theft that can leave them with little recourse.

The problem starts for many YouTube accounts and their viewers right when a new video goes live. Far too often, spam comments begin to flood onto videos right away, and frequently show up as the first posted responses. This means that no matter whether you come to a video right when you get a notification or years down the road, you're almost certainly going to be dealing with nonsense if you engage with the comments section.

Video creators find this problem particularly invasive because this inundation with AI-generated bot engagement takes away from the conversation that genuine viewers might otherwise have beneath the ideas expressed in a video. On YouTube and other platforms, healthy dialogue is part of the lifeblood that makes viewership communities what they are. Likes, comments, and a steady stream of responses help give video creators important feedback on their ideas and posting style, and this can serve as a place for like-minded individuals to come together in solidarity or to (respectfully) argue different perspectives on the topics that they find online. Healthy dialogue here is a major component of the experience, and a flood of spam hitting new videos as they go live often serves to diminish that community engagement.

Viewers may find themselves annoyed by spam comments on a routine basis, and some people may even be duped by ill-intentioned comments that lean into scam territory. However, keeping a few important trends and through lines in the theming in mind can help you ignore commentary that would otherwise be annoying and avoid links that only guide you toward scams designed to steal your information or money. Keeping these in mind can help keep you safer on the internet, even when viewing YouTube videos that haven't been entirely scrubbed of these kinds of threats and annoyances lately.

First, There's the nonsense commentary. On videos that have to do with personal finance (and others) you'll often see bizarre reactions that talk vaguely about a poster's experience with the subject matter. There is always something off about the language used in these kinds of spam notes. Frequently, they feel like cheap translations with odd verb usage or improper pronoun integrations. You've almost certainly seen one of these comments. These kinds of additions clog up the comments section and can interrupt the flow of routine conversation. On the other hand, lots of comments include links to outside resources that suggest they can help you invest with better returns, clean up your credit score, or provide some other kind of financial service. These are scams designed to part with your money or steal your personal information. Generally speaking, you should never click on links that appear in the comment section of a YouTube video.

Unfortunately, YouTube has been caught flat-footed when it comes to dealing with this wave of inappropriate behavior on its platform. YouTube offers a number of important tools to content creators for scrubbing these kinds of comments and the accounts that post them. The platform itself also offers it means of reporting inappropriate behavior and scam commentary. Unfortunately, Google, the parent company of YouTube (and the 'G' in the titanic collection of stocks known as FAANG), and the platform itself haven't been very proactive in tackling these kinds of issues head on. Rather, the onus of cleaning up the YouTube videos commentary section has been on the users rather than the platform that supports the videos.

This has led to an extreme surge of activity among fraudulent posters. A vast network of bot-operated YouTube profiles post countless volumes of commentary on videos across the spectrum of the platform every day. While YouTube could engage in proactive behavior to tamp down on this issue, it has thus far left to the problem to fester rather than approaching it head on. The result has been a substantial increase in engagement by scammers, and a growing distribution of nonsense, nuisance, and threat within this portion of the website's ecosystem. 

Another problem that has been an issue recently is known as "streamjacking." While YouTube has made strides to limit this issue as of late, streamjacking remains a problem that users should stay on the lookout for. This practice occurs when a scammer successfully hijacks a YouTube creator's account. Impersonation has long been a problem, and many users will be familiar with channels posting notes about fraudulent impostors using their likeness in an attempt to siphon personal details and money. But streamjacking takes this a step further.

Rather than posting links to scam websites and waiting for users to take the bait, streamjackers Take over a YouTube account and then run a live stream with a deepfake video playing to showcase some kind of seminar experience (this is a frequent choice from hijackers, but it could be anything, really). These videos tend to feature reputable individuals talking about how an investment in a select company or a service can help you grow your financial standing in one way or another. Frequently they direct viewers to send them funding in cryptocurrency transactions. Rather than just throwing links out there and waiting for the nets to collect victims, this is a more active fishing expedition that can ultimately look far more convincing.

In 2024 the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium featured reporting by a trio of Stony Brook University researchers. Their findings noted that 2.43% of all comments in their data set came from scam accounts. That might not sound like a big proportion, but the vast ocean of information out there on YouTube is truly so large that even a sliver translates into an unbelievably large volume in even a small sample size of videos. The paper noted a data set containing 8.8 million comments on videos from 20 unique YouTube channels spanning a six-month study period. Of this study set, over 200,000 comments came from more than 10,000 unique scam accounts.

Scam campaigns found here utilized the typical trends of random posting and link setting in an attempt to steal data and financial resources. Moreover, the researchers also found that these accounts frequently change identity in an attempt to hide from monitoring and deletion. Sometimes numerous name changes took place in just a 24-hour period, making it difficult to track and to deal with scammers without the help of automated tools and support from YouTube itself in many instances. As a percentage, the problem may seem relatively small. However, when put into context it's clear that this is a widespread issue with potentially gigantic ramifications. Again, on just 20 channels, scammers engaged in a measurable carpet bombing campaign resulting in over 200,000 individual posts.

Viewers obviously have to take this problem seriously and remain vigilant in the way they engage with others in the comments section. Many commenters are transparent, and it's clear that links and other language including a promise of great financial returns or sheer nonsense are simple scam attempts. However, sophisticated junk comments also exist in this marketplace of ideas. The volume of commentary can be overwhelming in some instances, and creators also find that they have to keep a sharp eye on their digital products.

Some channels have been targeted so heavily by scam campaigns that there are actually more comments posted by non-real users than the creators' actual, human audience. This can be a worrying phenomenon. Comments are an important way that creators engage with their audience. Feedback from viewers and a healthy discussion about whatever content the video might cover is an important way for people to share ideas and grow together. But YouTube channels that see enormous surges of fake engagement can be left with a rudderless sense of where to take their channel and its production heading into the future. This level of engagement from bots can also turn people away who might otherwise benefit from the knowledge or entertainment value that a YouTube creator has to offer. By scrolling through the comments and seeing dozens upon dozens of links to scam websites, it can ultimately make users feel a little queasy about the video creators themselves, unfairly tarnishing their reputation in the process.

Returning to the Stony Brook study, the authors of this research didn't just passively examine YouTube engagement trends. After the six month study course, the authors utilized an IRB-approved framework to reach out to scam commenters and engage with them in an attempt to understand what victims experience in the next steps of this pipeline.

A frequent sight in comment scams is a conversational sequence that begins innocently enough. The first post might be phrase as something like "I've seen this happen to my investments," attached to a video about trading in a bear market, for example. From there, numerous additional posts will pile on to that first comment within a matter of seconds, advancing the conversation toward the inevitable hook. Eventually, one of the comments will feature language to the effect of "Mr. Smith is a great investment broker and helped me grow my account." This post or a follow up addition will feature a link that reportedly takes viewers to this Mr. Smith. Another option is the use of a WhatsApp phone number to support contact with this wonder-broker (and sometimes the "phone number" utilizes non-ASCII characters to display a number while hiding a malicious link). In their engagement with these scammers, the research team found that only a small snippet of active scammers (those they successfully made contact with) had stolen somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million to $2 million from their victims. Extrapolated, the research team estimated that thefts stemming from YouTube comment scams easily rise above $100 million in total.

On the subject of financial loss, most YouTube scams involve the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (as do many other financial fraud schemes) as a means to funnel money away from unsuspecting victims. Generally speaking, anytime you might find yourself engaging with a scammer in a YouTube comment section the ask won't be a bank transfer but rather a cryptocurrency transaction. This should immediately raise red flags for anyone who is conversing with someone they believe to be an investment professional. Unless you're specifically seeking to engage with the cryptocurrency market directly, anytime you invest money in an asset it will involve fiat currency as a rule rather than a suggestion. Buying stocks requires you to invest real dollars, and virtually no one sells real estate professionally via the cryptocurrency marketplace. It is possible to purchase goods and even investment assets with cryptocurrency, but you'd be hard pressed to find legitimate advertisements directing you to prioritize make a transaction through this medium.

If you are prompted to send somebody cryptocurrency, it's important to take a step back and really think about what is being asked of you. If you found someone claiming to be an investment professional online in the YouTube comments section, you're almost certainly dealing with a scammer and this reality will only be reinforced by a financial asset that involves Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency alternatives. Cryptocurrency is notoriously difficult to trace, and getting it back features even longer odds. For this reason, scammers prefer to deal in that arena. This fact should give users pause.

To add insult to injury, another common pursuit of YouTube scammers feature posts that refer link followers to recovery firms. These sites suggest that they can get your money back if you've fallen victim to an online scammer. Naturally, these companies are all fraudulent, and will only take your money and run, as well. In most cases, the transaction that users will need to utilize in order to give their money to the scammers involves gift card codes or cryptocurrency purchases, just like the initial theft. Either way, once you've sent funds through one of these avenues, your money is virtually always unrecoverable. The reason why scammers utilize cryptocurrency and gift card codes is because they are generally untraceable and reversing the transaction is immensely difficult or impossible to achieve. The result is a siphoning of funds that can't be undone. This gives scammers a one-way funnel to part you with your money and then make off in the darkness undetected.

Therefore, anyone or any company offering to investigate your interaction with a scammer and promising to recover lost funds is lying to you. This kind of service simply does not exist in the real world, and anyone offering it is also a scammer themselves. Frequently, fraudulent actors operating YouTube comments scams will play both sides of this coin, so it's entirely possible that a person can be victimized by the same scammer on both ends of this environment.

Things aren't all bleak and filled with doom and gloom, however. Linus Tech Tips posted a video in early 2022 discussing this issue and highlighting one potent tool that YouTube creators have at their disposal to fight back against scammers. The online personality ThioJoe came into internet fame as a YouTuber who talked about joke tips and tricks. His videos included a Blu-ray conversion method for DVD that simply involved coloring a disk blue with a marker. These videos were clearly meant as a joke, but in recent times he has been active in fighting back against scammers.

YouTube Spammer Purge is an open source app that he created to help video posters eradicate fraudulent activity on their videos. The application allows content creators to search for users, filter comments, and batch delete and ban offending posters. This is all automated, allowing you to run the script frequently and purge scam comments with rapid pace and immediate effect. There's one hang up, though. YouTube allows users to run a maximum of 10,000 API requests each day. This means that a prolific poster will eventually run out of space in their daily limit to keep fraudulent commenters at bay across their entire catalog of content. Even so, the wider YouTube community can still pitch in to help support building a more user friendly experience.

While deleting comments in huge batches can only be done by channel owners, viewers can also play a role in keeping the comments section free from this kind of predatory activity. Anyone can download the app and run it to scan any YouTube video they desire. You can scan videos for fraudulent comments, and even though you can't delete those comments you can batch report them, flagging them as spam, fraudulent, or offensive in the process. If enough users report these accounts and their comments in large volumes, and video creators get serious about deleting these kinds of engagements on their videos, the YouTube algorithm will ultimately become better at recognizing fraudulent activity and cleaning it up all on its own.

It may not seem all that compelling to hear that viewers have a role to play in purging activity by internet crooks on a platform driven by creative uploaders and owned by one of the largest companies in the world. However, the reality is that any place you choose to spend your time can be made better by a community that takes pride in the space and feels a sense of ownership and duty to preserve it. Whether you're in a park in the physical world or online in the YouTube comments section, doing your part to help keep the space clean and accessible to all makes it a better place for everyone.