[derimagia]

I saw a few of livestream scams happen real-time so let me explain what I saw. I didn't see it on YouTube but I saw it on Twitch a few times and I never saw anyone mention it before.

Short answer is it's an evolution of the Elon Musk Twitter scams where people are told to send crypto (Usually bitcoin) to an address to double it. The main difference than the traditional scams is with livestream you have an audience - the chat.

Tens of thousands of viewbots to bring the counter on the livestream high and then the chat is flooded with chat messages but fake accounts that I can see how people could think they were real. Things trying to convince you that it is safe, that it worked, and even talking with each other asking how easy it is. It doesn't matter if the account is banned after 20 minutes or more, it's already done the damage.

First time I saw this was about ~6 months ago. It was a fake account with a similar name for a Dota streamer. They had fake footage of the game and I was pretty shocked. It had something like 10,000 viewers and after reporting the channel it was still up for a while.

Other times I've seen it with Elon Musk with footage of the Tesla plant talking to a reporter about crypto. I can see how the voices can be fakes as well and how much potential it can have when combined with the chat. These were up for less time.

[Scottn1]

I watch some live Fortnite on Twitch from time to time before falling asleep as I sometimes play with my son. Now I am a natural skeptic but I'm actually a little embarrassed to admit it, but a Twitch one of these scams actually had me for a few minutes. I don't own any crypto but it actually had me searching for the best way to get some bitcoin fast as I didn't want to miss out on this gift from Elon. If I actually owned any crypto I might have fallen for it fully, it was that good of a trick. It was so good I told some my wife the next day I saw one of the best scams in a while.

It was exactly as you described - with Elon Musk looking like he was "live" and the chat was busy and full of people saying "it worked for me. Thanks Elon!" type stuff. Even the channel had used ElonMusk in its name. I honestly thought I was just lucky and happened to catch a billionaire, who is also a known crypto supporter, being generous and trying to get more people into crypto as well by giving some away to the lucky few who caught him live.

What stopped me obviously is me not actually owning any crypto and not being able to get some instantly and without large fees, but also a few things that didn't feel right in the gut. Like the channel was something like "ElonMusk3239". I thought "surely Twitch would make sure the real one didn't need to have the 3,239th account with his name".

Also the website the link directed you to in the chat looked a little to simple and supposedly showing in real-time all the lucky people getting double along with all the crypto addresses - ALL without any sort of signup or verification, etc. You just submitted everything right there and boom you would get double back. Reminded me of those "free VBucks" website my son has come across before.

The final reality was when the channel got taken down while I was watching and another popped up within a minute in the Live Chat area again but with another ElonMuskxxxx name. Then that would get taken down and again another popped up. That is when I realized Twitch was currently in a battle with some group trying to scam crypto.

Definitely one of the most realistic looking scams I've seen in a while.