Through the extremely anticipated launch of Apple’s iPhone 16 on September 9, scammers flooded YouTube with stay streams that featured AI-generated variations of Apple CEO Tim Cook 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 generally known as Twitter), featured deepfakes of Tim Cook 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 Cook dinner assured viewers that Apple would ship again double the quantity of cryptocurrency they deposited. Nevertheless, in actuality, the scammers stole the funds.
One significantly 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 a whole lot of hundreds of views. Nevertheless, it is suspected that many of those views have been generated by bots.
YouTube’s help staff shortly acknowledged the difficulty, posting on X to induce customers to report any fraudulent movies. As of now, the pretend stay streams have been faraway from YouTube, and the accounts related to these scams have been shut down.
These streams happened 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 concentrating 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 trade occasions and interprets how they have an effect on the broader Web3 area. Her formal training in media tradition & digital rhetoric permits her to make use of a methodical method to evaluating crucial Web3 information information, together with large-scale occasions and the broader social sentiment inside the ecosystem.Gode is a mutilingual skilled, having studied in a number of universities all throughout Europe. This permits her to have a one-of-a-kind alternative to research Web3 social sentiments spanning completely different cultures and languages and, in flip, develop a a lot deeper understanding of how the Web3 area is rising inside completely different communities. With the remainder of her staff, Gode works to determine essential crypto information patterns and supply unbiased and data-driven data.Gode’s passions embrace working and speaking with individuals, and when she’s not researching Web3 information, she spends her time touring and watching true crime documentaries.
