What issue are we talking about?
When you make it big on YouTube, there are some bad characters that try to use your likeness to scam unsuspecting viewers. These characters would create a fake account with your likeness. Then, they would go into the comment section of your videos and offer your viewers prizes and giveaways. They’ll paste a link to a website. The viewer, thinking it’s you, would go to that website. Little do they know, they’ve been taken to a malicious website. Those sites will display ads or surveys, and things like these pump money into the imposters’ wallets. Needless to say, that’s a really scummy tactic to earn money.
YouTube is combating these imposter accounts
This is a major issue for the video-sharing platform, and thus, YouTube has taken notice; more importantly, it’s taken action. YouTube brought three useful changes to its policies that will help swat folks using spam tactics. Firstly, channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber count. The first red flag that gives away a scammer is how many subscribers they have. MKBHD has a whopping 15.8 million subscribers as of the writing of this article. If you see an account claiming to be the real deal with 134k subscribers, you’ll know that something is up. Next, YouTube will limit the use of special characters in account names. People use different special characters like “¢” instead of “C” or “¥” instead of “Y” in their account names. This way, they can produce an almost identical name to the channel they’re trying to imitate. Last, but not least, YouTube is expanding access to its “Stricter comment moderation” setting. Earlier this year, in response to the scam accounts, YouTube began testing more rigorous comment moderation on select YouTubers. When toggled on, YouTube will be pickier about which comments it lets through. With these changes, it seems that the company will diminish the number of spam accounts that plague comment sections. We’ll have to wait to see if this has any effect on the spam accounts we see.
