My channel was deleted... HOW?

this is an early version of a video which i'm just about to release which describes what happened to my youtube channel at the end of july 2021 you'll see that i was tricked into deleting my channel and this is the story of exactly how that happened well it all started off with this email i should explain first of all that youtube is owned by google and a lot of correspondence that i will get about youtube will come from various google accounts indeed you have to have a google account in order to get any ad revenue because it's google that handles all of this part for youtube but let's have a look closely at this email and you'll see why it's a little bit more than your standard phishing mail firstly it has genuinely come from google.com most phishing emails will come from something other than google or youtube but here the domain is correct after the event i had a good look at the smtp headers they confirmed what i already thought this user was able to log in to google chat and send emails from that domain and sending emails from there give it all the official stamps that made it look like a genuine google email and herein lies the first problem if you're a user of google chat you shouldn't be allowed to set your from address as anything at google.com all this does is allow openings for people like this to spoof that they are google.com but what about the contents of the email why on earth did i think that this was legitimate email the email itself wasn't that well formatted there were capital letters where there shouldn't have been but overall the english was just about okay and there were no spelling mistakes a sure sign of a scam the email simply said hi please note that we have noticed that you have a duplicate adsense account and as a result we will permanently suspend your youtube account if you're a creator on youtube you'll understand what this means adsense is the way to gain revenue via uploading videos on youtube but here's where coincidence will help scammers just the day before i received the email i swapped to a new phone and managed youtube through it i put two and two together and assumed that because i was using a new device somehow it may have generated this email it's a bit like getting a fake amazon phone call straight after you've placed an amazon order if it wasn't for that coincidence i'm almost certain that i wouldn't have fallen for this scam and i'm always in the habit of hovering over any links that appear in emails this way i can tell exactly where they're going to lead to and here once again we at chat.google.com which again seemed to be convincing so when i did click the link i was straight through to google chat but of course anyone can set up a google chat link what i should have been paying attention to was the email address of this chat support account it shouldn't have been creator hyphenpartners.com it should have been youtube or google.com but i was distracted i was doing other things and i just wasn't paying enough attention so i began a conversation with what i thought was youtube's support and very quickly the account name scrolled off the page the whole time the scammer used perfect english and asked very feasible and realistic sounding questions in hindsight i know that this guy was cutting and pasting from a script but at this point everything seemed convincing specifically he asked me to create what is called a brand account he asked me to go to the ad or manage your channels and create a new channel and because i thought i was resolving a duplicate id problem none of this seemed in any way risky so as instructed i browsed to my account added a channel name also called jim browning again none of this seemed in any way suspicious and at this point i certainly didn't suspect anything was amiss so i now had two channels one with 3.3 million subscribers and the other with zero i did ask whether doing this would mess up any of my subscribers or channel friendly name or anything but of course our scammer answered no it wouldn't affect anything i then give them the url of the new empty channel i was then asked to browse to the account section of the new empty channel again all of the links were valid they were going to youtube they were not going off the platform so i thought nothing of this i was then instructed to click on advanced settings and then move channel to your google account or other brand account when you look at this option it clearly says that you can move your channel including its videos likes etc from one account to another but of course this was to my own account so at this point it wasn't ringing any alarm bells and here's the second problem this move option makes it clear that all of the videos will be retained and simply clicking the replace button won't have any major effects the scammer even asked me could i see the word replace at the bottom right hand corner and i confirmed that i could he'd plainly done this many times before and when i hit replace i got this warning message it said that the following will be permanently deleted comments that i made on youtube replies and thumbs up and my search history nothing about deletion of any videos or any channel content but this was making me scared i took a screenshot of this and went back to the scammer to ask a bit of detail about what this message meant this function said that only comments on youtube replies and thumbs up on comments and a search or watch history would be replaced so at this point again i wasn't feeling overly worried about it even though it had an option to delete channel the scanner assured me that once i hit delete i would then have the option to replace the channel again i thought that i'd simply move all of my videos to this new channel again there was a lack of clarity here as far as i was concerned i was moving my channel contents to a new one i wasn't deleting anything but what i was actually doing was replacing my current channel with a blank channel and with the channel now moved he asked me to replace the original channel with the contents of this one the blank channel and as soon as i hit the replace button seven years of work 170 videos and 3.3 million subscribers were instantly lost but this scam wasn't about being malicious it was about gaining control of this new account to take control of my account and therefore any revenues associated with it the scammer would need my password and this is where stage two of the scam kicked in he gave me a link to a google form and only at this point was i certain that it was a scam the form asked for your partner's full name and the publisher id for the adsense account these two questions together form part of security set which if you need to reset a password you will need to be able to change that password in addition i was asked for the email address of the youtube account and worst of all the last confirmed password of that youtube account using all of those details effectively the scammer could gain control and only at this point did the penny drop and i figured out the whole thing was a scam and only at this point much too late of course did i look carefully at who i was speaking to the creator hyphenpartners.com immediately jumped out and only now did i start asking the questions that i should have done at the very start how do i verify that i know who i'm talking to the scammer told me that i should contact the in-house team google at support hyphen youtube.com but he misspelled youtube and only now that i was taking him off script did his lack of english as a first language become apparent i was desperate to find out a bit more about the scammer who managed to scam me so i started taking the initiative and asked him a few questions he initially went a bit quiet probably checking that form i hadn't filled out and he knew he was going to have to ask me a few of those questions if he was to gain access to my account so he started with asking me my phone number i told him that if he really was youtube support he should already know my phone number but he tried the reset link which reveals just the last two digits of my real phone number nice try but it wasn't going to wash then he finally admitted that he was revealed as a scammer but also claimed that i had somehow moved all of the contents to a channel that belonged to the scammer i knew this wasn't true i challenged him on this i owned the account he didn't have the password therefore he couldn't gain control so he finally said i only want 100 and i will give you a way to recover your channel now it was also becoming obvious that english wasn't his first language he gave me a very confused reply telling me that i own the way to retrieve the channel directly but even though i was desperate to get my channel back i knew that this guy couldn't do anything to help me i needed to go to the real youtube channel support people i told him as much but he kept insisting that he was youtube i told him that we were past all of that and then bizarrely again in broken english he asked me what initially convinced me that he was indeed youtube i think he was trying a way to see if he could improve his scamming technique but this was my opportunity to learn a bit more about this scammer if i could flatter him he might open up and reveal a little bit more about himself both forced and unforced i told him that because the initial email was from google.com that i found that convincing but he still kept pushing as to why i thought he was really youtube again to flatter him i told him that creatorpartners.com was a convincing domain and then i asked him well do i have to go to support or could he help me tidy all this mess up he said he would help me for free what a kind soul and after all of that all he did was tell me to go to the real support team and tell him to get a bit of help with a new brand account and recover it correctly had i actually paid 100 for that advice i'd have felt pretty scammed once again even more bizarrely he thanked me and gave me some greetings from the youtube team and actually asked me did i want to work with him he had no idea what my channel was about so i asked him for an interview anonymously of course he seemed surprised that the reason that i wanted the interview was actually content for my own channel and in fact what he really wanted to ask was do i hit anyone enough to take their youtube channels he really was trying to recruit me as a scammer then he admitted that he had eight years experience in youtube i presume this means in youtube scams i then asked him how i could speak with him but he didn't seem to understand this and just repeated my own question back to me it seemed the only way that he would communicate with me would be via whatsapp so i gave him a number and asked him to communicate on that device and whilst the burner phone was charging up i asked him a few more questions about a scam specifically about people who had two-step authentication i knew that even if he did get my password the two-step authentication should block his access but our hangouts conversation ended with him demonstrating he didn't really know what two-step authentication was and he signed off with these are my methods only and now i have more than 12 youtube channels one with six million and another with three million subscribers somehow i highly doubt that this is the case it was clear he liked bragging probably falsely so we continued our conversation on whatsapp his whatsapp name was youtube support not really a shock that one and he asked me if the real youtube support were having a conversation with me at this stage they were and i was hoping to get the channel sorted quickly but as it turned out it would take days but i was keen to know exactly how his scam worked obviously he was after the accounts themselves but i asked him how successful he was just how much money was he making with this scam and he then sent me a screenshot the screenshot seemed to indicate that whatever this channel was it had made sixteen thousand dollars in the last 28 days that means it would have been a very big youtube channel it's very difficult to tell whether this is something he's just cut and pasted to show off or whether he genuinely owns such an account i'm pretty sure he's lifted this from a youtube video but i'm not sure which one i did a quick search but i still couldn't find this exact page if you think this is a screenshot from a video you've seen please let me know in the comments but i wanted to speak to the guy i wanted to know how i get into all of this and would he talk on the phone he answered unfortunately he couldn't i asked him if he cared if he was destroying people's livelihoods but he answered that he needed the money and could i send him some money so they could leave this thing so despite making his thousands of dollars per month in these hijacked accounts it seemed that the only way out was for me to send him money but what he didn't know was while i was having this conversation i was setting up a grabify link this would reveal his ip address and any devices he might be using so i suggested to the scammer that maybe the best idea would be for him to create his own youtube channel i sent him a link to what looked like a screenshot but of course it was my grabify link and within a second of sending the link he had clicked it and revealed that he was in southwest turkey he was also using the web version of whatsapp because i could see that he was using a windows 10 computer and because the grabify link showed a real random account information he seemed genuinely interested and wanted to know how much money i would make for every thousand views i kept on the small talk for a little bit before he finally asked me did i know his nationality although i was going to suggest turkish i thought i'd play with him for a bit to see what would happen i suggested us and india before he finally said syrian given that syria and turkey share a border there's a possibility that this guy has moved from syria to turkey he wondered if i was surprised but at this stage nothing surprised me at all so i then asked him just how much money he was making with this scam and he claimed almost two and a half million dollars so the obvious question i had was for someone who was worth two and a half million dollars why he was continuing to scam in this way whenever he could settle down for the rest of his life so i asked this millionaire why he asked me for one hundred dollars if he had all this millions in the bank i told him i didn't believe that he actually had that two and a half million dollars then when i was getting no answers i pushed the flattery bit again telling him how good his english was and that everything worked right up until the google form so i sent him one more grabify link just to see would he click the thing and once again seconds later i had his proper mobile device he had disconnected his pc and this time he was using his samsung galaxy a50 phone to look at the correspondence this also told me that it was very unlikely that he was using a proxy this was his real ip address and he really was in south west turkey but it also marked the end of our conversation i asked him did he have any further successes but the message wasn't received i guess he switched off the device in the meantime i was having lots of trouble trying to get the channel restored initially the team thought that i may have been compromised i did explain that i never lost control of the account and i just needed it restored from deletion but i was obviously through to a team who dealt only with compromised accounts i wasn't through to the people who could actually restore it so they took two agonizing days to tell me what i already knew that the account wasn't compromised but worse than this they told me that since my channel was deleted they don't have a way to recover a deleted channel this just wasn't true and i don't understand why they sent this in correspondence plenty of people had noticed that the channel had disappeared and indeed it feel lots of speculation about how the channel was deleted and how i've been hacked somehow of course the truth is a lot more simple than the conspiracy theories floating around but even so it was funny to read some of the reactions and some of the conspiracy theories centered around the fact that my channel now seemed to be overtaken by somebody else also called jim browning but unfortunately this is just a side effect of the fact that my channel was deleted so for a brief period of time when you went to youtube.com jim running you were through to somebody else's channel i'd like to apologize to this jim browning for all the confusion that may have arisen but hopefully it'll lead to a bit of an uptick in hits to his channel to help explain to my followers exactly what was going on i made a tweet about the experience i described that my channel had been deleted albeit through my own hands and that it was an attempted scam i received a lot of support via twitter and people like mark gruber even chipped in with their own experiences of attempted scams in the similar sort of way and i received an awful lot of support from within the youtube community this is perugi from scammer payback dedicating one of his live streams to supporting my channel thank you progy but eventually four days later youtube were indeed able to restore my channel ironically they sent virtually the same instructions that the scammer had done they got me to create a new blank channel and move it to a brand account so i'd like to thank christopher from the youtube support team for clearing up my mess but the biggest thing that i've learned out of the whole experience is that really anyone can be scammed and that includes me and you the circumstances just need to be right also be wary of anything that purports to be from google.com any user it seems will be able to use this domain it doesn't mean it's representative of google i blindly followed instructions and i should have really followed my own advice and asked more questions checked and double checked what was going on and basically take my time over everything that was happening and i'm pretty sure that two-step authentication would have saved me even if i'd filled out the form i'm pretty certain that the guy would not be able to log into my account simply because i had two-step authentication switched on if you're a creator on youtube this is an absolute essential and as for the syrian scammer who managed to take down my channel for four or five days i did report the email address that he was using to the hosts who were dreamhost.com they told me that they're already aware of this particular domain and we're actively investigating the matter although i've heard absolutely nothing since [Music] um you

Channel: Jim Browning

Views: 2,763,053

Keywords:

Id: YIWV5fSaUB8

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Intelligent-Craft-54]

Of all people to get scammed...

[u/turnturnburn]

Honestly, given what Jim did afterwards, I'm almost glad it happened so he got the opportunity to walk us through the whole thing.

[u/[deleted]]

If Jim can be tricked, the fucking head of the NSA can.

[u/fo11ow3r]

The coincidence factor can really be a big influence. I recently made an online purchase for my Mom using my account. She received a robo-call shortly after that which claimed to be from the company and for a charge very close to the legitimate one, but on her account. She didn’t follow through, but it did take us a little while, and lots of concern, before I figured out it was only a coincidence that lined up with the scam call and not an actual fraudulent charge.

I’m really thankful Jim got his channel sorted out, and for all I’ve learned about scams from him so I can protect myself and family!!

[u/whatwhatdb]

This happened to a really nice guy last year, who had a popular DIY electrical channel (Sparky Channel) with almost 1k videos and 182k subscribers.

In this video he explains what happened... he gave his password to a scammer, and a few minutes later all of his videos were deleted. He never got his channel back, but he's back up to 100k subscribers now, with a ton of video uploads on the new channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co9BnlH6zZA

[u/5371EI]

Having youtube support help you with anything in a timely fashion should have been a huge red flag.

[u/Bishopkilljoy]

This happened to the Spiffing Brit too. He's back to only 2k subs

[u/1cmanny1]

Seems obvious it was a scam - no Google support email looks like that.

However, this just shows that it can really get anyone.

[u/nervousflexrelax]

"Youtube Support messaged you on Google Chat" isn't this a major red flag?