Stolen TikTok Videos have Infiltrated YouTube Shorts

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Scammers are taking full advantage of the debut of Google’s new TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, which has proven to be an excellent platform for feeding stolen content to billions of engaged viewers. Researchers have cautioned that this content is being exploited to conduct rackets such as advertising adult dating websites, hustling diet pills, and selling marked-up commodities. Although YouTube Shorts is still in beta, scammers have had plenty of time to shift their best TikTok-tested flimflams over to the Google cosmos, which is already populated by billions of viewers. 

Satnam Narang, a Tenable analyst, has been analyzing social media for over a decade and discovered that scammers are having great success stealing TikTok’s most viral videos and exploiting them on YouTube Shorts to get viewers to click on a variety of sites and links. Narang examined 50 distinct YouTube channels and discovered that, as of December, they had accumulated 3.2 billion views across at least 38,293 videos stolen from TikTok creators. He stated that the YouTube channels had over 3 million subscribers. 

The most common type of fraud Narang discovered was the use of extremely popular TikTok videos, especially challenges showing gorgeous women, to serve links to adult dating sites that run affiliate programmes that pay for clicks.