An anonymous user on YouTube was live broadcasting an old interview with Tim Cook, which appeared to be being exploited to draw attention to a cryptocurrency fraud – and when it went live, tens of thousands of viewers tuned in.
If you’ve ever seen cryptocurrency frauds on YouTube, you’d know a lot of what was going on. The false live broadcast drew notice by using an assortment of Apple keywords in both the title and description. When you opened it, though, it was riddled with strange messages pointing to a shady-looking crypto site.
There were several indications that the stream was a forgery. It had an unusual title: “Apple Event Live. Ceo of Apple Tim Cook: Apple & Metaverse in 2022.” and it was playing an old CNN interview with Cook from 2018. The streamer inserted the Bitcoin and Ethereum logos to the video feed, covered the CNN Money logo with the wording “Apple Crypto Event 2022,” and at the bottom added strong text reading “URGENT NEWS.” And if you went to the channel’s page (which redirected to be “Apple LIVE”), the URL had nothing to do with Apple. This might imply that the channel had a different function before being seized by nefarious actors and used to host the stream.
YouTube did not immediately react to a comment request. The feed was pulled shortly after this report was published for breaching YouTube’s terms of service.
While the false live feed was clearly not from Apple, it occurred at a time when the corporation is under a lot of scrutinies. Apple’s major iPhone 14 announcement event was live-streamed a few hours ago, and CEO Tim Cook is presently being interviewed at Vox Media’s Code conference this evening. This deceptive broadcast seems to be an attempt to deceive those who may be aware that Apple is having a big day but aren’t sure what’s going on.
The broadcast was suggested on the YouTube site, which might have been due in part to the Apple event taking place throughout the day. The feed initially had roughly 16K viewers, but after a time, it had almost 70K.
The Verge also discovered a live feed on a different channel that claimed to be from “Apple Inc.” The webcast pretended to be an event with Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Apple and the metaverse, but it was actually a repurposed interview with Musk and Blockhead Jack Dorsey about Bitcoin. It had over 10,000 spectators on the webcast and also connected to a suspicious-looking crypto site in the conversation. It has been removed as well.
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