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Industry News
2019/11

Ircha Gaming Loses Channel Due To Hackers And YouTube Is Slow To Help

OAG Staff

There’s been a phishing scam going around that allows hackers to gain access to YouTube channels through a malicious link. GamerThumbTV originally had his channel compromised and spent quite some time agonizing over the ordeal until he was finally able to get his channel back. Now Ircha Gaming is going through a similar problem, and YouTube is dragging their feet in restoring the channel.

Just a short spell after the stroke of midnight on November 12th, 2019, Ircha posted a tweet indicating that her channel had been compromised.

The Norwegian content creator has just under 20,000 subscribers and over 1.2 million views, according to Social Blade. She’s been on the incline in recent times as far as gaining subscribers and moving up the ranks.

However, after mistakenly clicking on a link sent to her in an e-mail scam. She goes into detail about the scam in the two and a half minute video she posted up on an alternate channel shortly after pinging YouTube about the problem.

She also later posted a tweet about the incident on her Twitter account, holding up a sign with the date and her account information, as well as the date that the hacking took place, which was on November 11th, 2019.

She was hoping to get the attention of Team YouTube to eventually restore her account and allow her to regain access to the channel.

Various followers of Ircha have been also pinging Team YouTube in hopes of getting them to pay attention to Ircha’s plight, but so far there doesn’t appear to be any response from them.

YouTube, however, has been going through all sorts of rapid changes that are negatively impacting the user ecosystem of the service. Starting December 10th, they acknowledge that they can completely wipe out a channel if they no longer deem it “commercially viable”.

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But this problem of YouTubers being affected by scammers is a growing issue that doesn’t seem to be getting addressed in a timely manner at all. For instance, Ircha and GamerThumbTV weren’t alone getting spear-phished by the scammers, MarcoStyle was also affected.

The scammers posed as ad sponsors and when he engaged with them in hopes of striking a deal, they compromised his account, decoupled it from his Gmail, and locked him out of his own channel. Unlike Ircha, Marco was able to get the attention of YouTube after Paul Tassi from Forbes brought it to the attention of Ryan Wyatt, the head of YouTube Gaming.

Unfortunately, Marco still doesn’t have his account back.

Worse yet, the people who hijacked his account have been using it for malicious purposes and have already grifted $15,000 from other users.

How? Well, it gets a little more complicated than just a simple phishing scam.

Apparently, some of the digital thieves are using the accounts to scam people out of cryptocurrency.

According to a video from YouTuber Upper Echelon Gamers, the person who acquired Marco’s channel was using the livestream feature to steal money from people.

The rabbit hole to that one goes deep, diving into impersonation, a bitcoin scam attached to Ripple, and all sorts of other skullduggery.

The main issue is that YouTube doesn’t seem to be acting quickly in policing this kind of content at all. In fact, they seem more intent on demonetizing channels that belong to anti-PC figures like Mister Metokur than they do in preventing users from falling victim to cryptocurrency scams.

If YouTube decides to eventually restore the account we’ll update the article, but for now it seems like Ircha is in a tough bind and YouTube is slow to help.

(Thanks for the news tip Mekel Kasanova and Mana Origin)

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