Scammers live-streamed on YouTube a fake Apple crypto event

Scammers live-streamed on YouTube an old interview with Tim Cook as part of a fake Apple crypto event, and tens of thousands of users viewed it.

Cybercriminals were live-streaming on YouTube an old interview with Tim Cook as part of a fake Apple crypto event, and tens of thousands of users viewed it. The interview was transmitted by CNN conducted in 2018.

To deceive the users the scammers filled the title and description with Apple keywords.

“The fake live stream was getting attention by filling its description with an array of Apple keywords in both the title and description. But when you actually opened it up, it was filled with odd messages linking to a shady-looking crypto site.“APPLE CRYPTO EVENT 2022”” reported The Verge.

The scammers covered the CNN logo in the original interview with the text “Apple Crypto Event 2022,” and added Bitcoin and Ethereum logos to the stream. The video also included a bold text reading “URGENT NEWS” at the bottom.

Fake Apple live stream
 Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

The fake live stream was launched while Apple was streaming its big iPhone 14 announcement event in an attempt to catch the attention of the users looking for any video from the IT giant. 

Visiting the channel’s page it is clear that it was hijacked by attackers and used to stream the video.

After The Verge published the news about the fraudulent live stream, YouTube removed the video for violating company terms of service.

“I came upon this stream because it was recommended on my YouTube homepage — that might have been in part because I’ve been watching Apple videos from the event throughout the day.” continues The Verge. “When I first started watching the fake stream, there were around 16K viewers, and right before first publishing this story, that count was nearly 70K.”

The Verge also reported having found another live stream on a separate channel, the stream was advertised as an event featuring Cook and Elon Musk about Apple and the metaverse. In this case the stream was viewed by above 10,000 viewers.

Update September 7th, 10:54PM ET: YouTube has removed the live streams.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, scam)