YouTube just served up this video to me on the home page. On first glance, I thought it was a new Telsa announcement. Then a few minutes in realized it's an AI redub for a bitcoin scam. To a casual viewer, it might just look like the audio is a bit out of sync vs AI generated scam.
It already has over 8k likes. Hard to tell if people are just upvoting scams for the fun of it or just automatically liking Telsa videos without carefully watching it.
I saw that and reported it. The "Tesla" channel had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The name was actually "Tesla" like the real one.
You can invoke the algorithm's ire for even mentioning a concept that's not G rated, but if you steal the logo, video, and voice of a company to commit fraud, it's just fine. They really need to clean up.
PS - It seems channel names are not unique. That's a problem.
Channel names are unique but the channel display name is not. If you click on the channel you will see that the channel name is "@TesIa-Musk" and its identifier is "UC4NV-QGBa5ZtMxAvc-xxSRw", which is an unique ID that persists channel name changes. Searching historical youtube metadata for that ID reveals that the channel used to contain some random Indian songs [0]
The youtube accounts used in these scams are typically from victims of info stealer malware that has compromised their google/youtube cookies and / or passwords. It is baffling how often these Tesla or Elon musk scams gain algorithmic traction and at worst it can take hours until they are deleted. At the very least they could add some warnings if the name of a high sub count channel was recently changed.
It would be great if YouTube implemented something similar to community notes. Either that or show a warning on channels that share the same display name as a verified channel.
It already has over 8k likes. Hard to tell if people are just upvoting scams for the fun of it or just automatically liking Telsa videos without carefully watching it.