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There was a massive Twitter hack recently that gave cybercriminals access to verified Twitter handles of celebrities and famous personalities. Some hackers got access to the handles of the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates to spread a cryptocurrency scam through their accounts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were scammed, as a result, until Twitter was alerted to the red flag.
A similar kind of hack campaign in India has targetted two admired gamer personalities on YouTube: CarryMinati, aka Ajey Nagar, and 8Bit_Thug, aka Animesh Agarwal.
CarryMinati is a roaster and has 24 million subscribers on his main channel, which was unaffected. But his second channel, CarryisLive, which is meant to stream games, was the one that got hacked to run the cryptocurrency scam. This channel currently has 6.67 million subscribers.
YouTube was quick to respond to CarryMinati, apologising for the unfortunate incident and extending their hand in coordination to rectify the issue.
Similarly, 8Bit_Thug, who is an esports organisation (8Bit) owner and PUBG Mobile streamer with around 600K subscribers on YouTube, has lost access to his email address as well as the channel.
He was first on the victim list, as the hack took place on the evening of 24th July. Before he could realise what had happened, 12 hours later, the community noticed another bitcoin scam happening on CarryMinati's channel.
CarryMinati's old audio used by hackers
The hackers played an old charity stream to lure audiences into thinking that it was CarryMinati himself who was streaming and crowdfunding for a good cause. But the funding links and payment addresses on the description were suspicious. Because the YouTube gaming community had experienced such a security intrusion with 8Bit_Thug's channel, it was clear that the same scammers were doing this.
The hackers later changed 8Bit_Thug's channel name and photo, and made all the uploaded content private in an attempt to own the channel permanently. However, YouTube India has responded and confirmed they are looking into the matter.
On Twitter, Animesh has urged the YouTube officials to resolve the matter or at least freeze the channel to prevent further damage. In reply, Lester, the head of YouTube Gaming, has assured the content creator that the company was looking into the matter and would fix it as soon as possible.
As of now, Thug's channel seems to be under inspection by YouTube, as it isn't visible in search results. The matter should get resolved soon. This type of hacking and scamming has been present in the platform for long, though YouTube has done well to defend the victim each time.
