How YouTube and Google became complicit in Financing the Russian Mafia
Tags: discuss, cryptocurrency, chatgpt
Published: 2024-03-07 11:46:44

This is the most interesting rabbit hole I've dived into for a while. It started with me being offered _"a job"_ a couple of days ago.

![Job offer](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/sihalj222gzd5jnefarb.png)

Normally I don't care about such things, and I typically just politely say no. However, over the last year I've been drowning in rubbish marketing myself, making it more difficult for us to communicate our own products and services - So I was kind of at _"the tipping point"_ on this one, and therefor I started a little bit of investigating around the mechanics of the scam.

After some few hours I realised it was based on a crypto scam. The scam is based upon YouTube ads for a video that shows crypto traders how to create trading bots using ChatGPT. According to the ad, these bots can make traders thousands of EUROs per day, but what they are actually doing is flushing out the trader's trading account, sending all the crypto to a wallet controlled by this guy.

![Russian Mafia guy](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/je02bgti8f8inaq1asnd.png)

This guy is a Russian crypto trader, whom for mysterious reasons decided he should share his knowledge with everybody in the world, giving everybody an opportunity to become rich the way he got. Not only is he willing to freely share his advice with random YouTubers, but he's so altruistic he's even _paying for ads_ to make sure he can increase his reach.

In addition to paying for ads, he's also paying an army of mindless Zoombies from 3rd world countries to create fake comments, and fake subscribes on his own YouTube channel, to such artificially inflate his own videos - In addition to that this army of zoombies is also paid for commenting on other channels to such funnel fresh idiots into his own video such that they can _"magically become rich on crypto"_.

Ignoring the fact that you'd have to be literally the dumbest person on earth to actually fall for such rubbish, this is actually a [securities fraud](https://dev.to/polterguy/sundar-pichai-might-be-arrested-for-securities-fraud-4cnc). Under US securities laws it carries a maximum penalty of up to 70 years in prison.

Being a good and honest citizen, I of course informed all the people having commented on his YouTube channel, and congratulating them with having participated in something that could in theory end up with 70 years of _"free food and lodging"_ in the US.

![Commenting on YouTube](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/bczp3g1o6od7i6mn9l2c.png)

I also informed the FBI and SEC on Twitter. However, I'll search for their email address once I'm done writing this blog 😊

Notice, I need to emphasise, I never care about such things too much. However, since we started [AINIRO.IO](https://ainiro.io), we've been _drowning in garbage marketing such as this_, making it 100 times more difficult to create a sustainable business, with a sustainable business model - And this time I just flipped!

## YouTube is complicit

The paradox is that YouTube is actually complicit in this crime. The reasons is because they made money from it, because the Russian mafia guy _paid for YouTube ads_ to spread his reach.

![YouTube complicit](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/vlmjegxbqp1mf0dg437f.png)

In addition, I have reported these ads, _multiple times_, to try to have them removed - Yet still they're up there, stealing views from us, making it more expensive for us to pay for our marketing. I'm a Norwegian, but I assume you can easily recognise the ghist of the receipt email YouTube sent me ...

![Reporting the scam to YouTube](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/s4ckn4tsnzv8c5zo6gdg.png)

Ignoring the fact that it's a federal crime, crazy immoral and unethical, the above asshole is also _competing for the same ad keywords as we are competing for_ - Implying we risk having to pay twice the price for our ads, because this asshole is _"stealing"_ our keywords to rip of people from their crypto earnings.

In addition, scams such as these gives ChatGPT and AI a bad reputation, resulting in that others might associate us with scams, simply because we've got a ChatGPT-based product.

## The code

The code itself is almost legitimate. It was probably indeed created by ChatGPT. However, after it was created, a couple of lines were changed, such that instead of trading, it would flush out your account, and send all your crypto to the above asshole's wallet. You can see the dubious line of code below.

![Dubious code](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/m94vo9gs9p0d33xwqt1j.png)

You can watch me go through the entire scam in the following YouTube video. Paradoxically, it will probably end up with less than 50 views, while the above asshole's video has hundreds of thousands of views ...

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z27BHANDqhY %}

## Wrapping up

I need to emphasise that I typically don't care too much about what brain dead crypto traders are doing. My personal opinion is that if you fall for rubbish like this, you need to be protected against your own ignorance, and maybe have a legal guardian appointed to take care of your finances. Because this is such a cheap scam, it's difficult to believe people are actually falling for it. However, obviously a lot of people are, and a lot of people are loosing their crypto because of it.

And as long as people are falling for this rubbish, our job becomes 100 times more difficult, because legitimate products are _drowning in garbage marketing based on social media scams and cheap crypto scams_. So I'm therefor doing this from personal reasons, not because _"I'm such a nice guy"_.

I will therefor finish with a statement, which is if you need [a legitimate ChatGPT-based product, and an AI chatbot, you can visit our website here](https://ainiro.io). Our product is _a legitimate product_, and not some cheap ripoff scam such as the above guy's crypto theft ...

Now if Google had _any amount of decency left in their soul, they would offer us free advertising for some $50,000 for having provided this service to the world_!

## Edit

I have now sent an email to the SEC in the US about the scam.

![Whistleblowing email](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tw1sndehq4kde8fqfbea.png)

## Edit 2

The US Securities and Exchange Commission have just now sent me a receipt of that they have received my email. So let's see what comes out of this ...

![SEC receipt](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6j5ymscdunk3zplc8xz7.png)