you've probably seen comments like this that are verified have the mr beast profile picture but
they're not actually mr beast now behind these harmless looking fake mr beasts are a group of
malicious cyber hackers stealing innocent people's channels who never get any retribution and after
finding the 15 year old guy behind it all he tried to hack me too only encouraging me to
work up every level of this manipulative youtube scam to put an end to their crimes and hopefully
get these people their channels back but to understand how we got here we have to go back
a bit when i was looking through the comments of my own videos and noticed blue he had the verified
check mark and the mr beast logo making me think he was an affiliate of mr weeks because why would
youtube let some faker using the mr beast logo be verified but after clicking on the channel
it's clear that blue is not jimmy comet channels like this are everywhere on youtube and they're
all verified with hundreds of thousands of subscribers they'll say they used to make other
types of videos and just decided to delete them all and turn to commenting but why would anyone
do that i decided the best way to understand their motives was to contact one of myself so i
did and i got an almost immediate reply he agreed to an interview as long as i didn't show his face
before the interview however i wanted to do a bit more research you see it turns out if you
plug any of his fake mr beast channels into the wayback machine which allows you to see what sites
looked like in the past you can see that they all used to make other types of videos it's possible
that some of these channels may have been sold on the black market meaning they used to belong to
someone else which is also illegal under the terms of service but if scythe was merely purchasing
these channels at least it meant he was doing no harm since he was really just messing with
the algorithm by rebranding these dead channels and hiring people to comment all over youtube but
well just listen to the story he tells i'm scythe i'm 15 i own six verified youtube channels i used
to normally make content but my channel got terminated three months ago because i was
streaming the ksi logan paul fights i worked so hard for those 4k subscribers on the channel so
i was like yeah i'm gonna abuse the system until i get 100k no matter what i wanted a youtube like so
badly so i try commenting everywhere on youtube i do what i do i can't tell you what if i can
make a new channel after 100k like two months he's got some secret method to get any channel
thousands of subscribers and it's not just commenting which makes sense although commenting
probably raises the subscriber counts of these channels their comments would never have been seen
if they didn't already have the verified check mark something they can only get if they already
have a hundred thousand subscribers so those initial 100k must come from somewhere he told me
he's selling this method of growing your channel at 10 euros per thousand subscribers he continued
to go out about how these weren't bots showing me that by uploading this specific video over
and over it will grow your channel a crazy amount somehow leveraging a weird algorithmic flaw in
youtube shorts in fact he offered to demonstrate so i created a new google account called it what
in the style of all these fake mr beast channels and he asked me to make it a brand channel a brand
channel allows people to have access to an account do things like comment and upload videos without
needing your login info making the real owner of the channel in this case me feel safe and
protected using this section i gave him manager permission on the channel he then used this new
channel to upload 15 of these shorts telling me he would continue to upload them throughout
the day and that within 24 hours the channel would definitely have a thousand subscribers
then when we got the number of subscribers we wanted we could delete all the videos and i'd
be left with a valuable channel so i ended the interview gathered the footage and waited as i
planned to let scythe make this channel magically grow but this is where things started to unravel
this is a lake it's not the ocean and if you aren't from the midwest you may have never seen a
non-ocean body of water be this vast yet it seemingly goes on forever making everything in it
impossible to manage youtube seems to struggle with this too i mean a hundred
thousand subscribers feels pretty big but there are 306 000 channels with 100 000 subscribers
that's humbling but it's really hard to hit 100k and anyone who hits that milestone wants to feel
appreciated the problem is that a number like that is sort of nothing in the vastness of youtube so
even when a big channel like this gets hacked it's not really youtube's top priority
to respond after posting both youtube shorts about the interview the real minecraft player
1.0 saw the video and his friend emailed me about what happened essentially minecraft player had
his channel stolen from scythe and before you give any judgment to minecraft player about how
he could possibly let this occur just listen to what happened he built his gaming channel to 153
000 subscribers but his videos weren't performing how they used to after seeing lol in the comment
section he thought maybe he too could try commenting all over youtube in order to revive his
channel so after replying to his comments scythe quickly messaged him and promised that he could do
just that minecraft player just had to give scythe and a few friends access by making his
channel a brand channel so they wouldn't need his login info to comment all over youtube and gain
subscribers the same way i made a brand channel when scythe was demonstrating his suspicious sub
growth method scythe told minecraft player to give a bunch of his friends the manager role in him
the owner role telling him that that was essential for allowing them all to comment that's the first
lie you don't need the owner role to comment and giving that up gives the hacker everything
they need to do whatever they want but there's no description anywhere that says what this means so
minecraft player didn't know that essentially handed the channel over to scythe because
he was still the primary owner making it look like he had full control within the week the
guys were commenting all over youtube like they said they would but minecraft player refused to
change his name and profile picture to fit the mr beast look they kept asking but minecraft player
1.0 didn't want to impersonate anyone eventually he woke up to this scythe had changed the roles on
his channel to make him the sole and only owner the channel had been renamed to money and soon
all the content was deleted and it was rebranded to look exactly how site wanted i think he wanted
to hack me too since during the interview he set my channel to a friend and contemplated trying to
prick me in the same way decided against it and i know this because this entire chat message was in
the screen recording of the interview that site took and sent to me obviously forgetting to watch
it through or remember that he was recording this entire interaction i also have these dms courtesy
of some of scythe's old friends whose channels he hacked to and that's what these hackers do they
build up trust until you give them just enough power to do some damage after finding all this
out i quickly took all the access scythe had on my what channel off because although his little sub
growth experiment was interesting i was worried he could somehow find some connection to my main
channel through the account and hack me too i also introduced that the reason he was selling
subscribers may have been more sinister than i realized because the method was so similar to
how he hacked minecraft player 1.0 he could have easily tricked someone he was selling subscribers
to into giving him owner access giving him a brand new way to infiltrate and steal but
i want to defend scythe for a second scythe may be a cyber criminal currently feeling no remorse but
it's important to note that he's not the only one there are likely thousands of people on youtube
doing exactly what he's doing exploiting the brand channel feature or other parts of youtube in order
to gain clout and that's just it clout scythe is 15. and although i'm not sure i would have
gotten wrapped up in this sort of mess it's easy to see how he got manipulated into becoming a
scammer with the promise of views in subscribers after doing it the honest way failed when making
a mistake he probably didn't realize think back to when you were that age or if you are that age
think about your reliance on these numbers studies of teenagers brains done at ucla reveal that
seeing their posts with a ton of likes compared to their photos with fewer likes activated the
nucleus accumbens of the brains of these teens and part of the reward circuitry that's most active in
adolescence that means that although the dopamine rush from a big social media post feels great no
matter the age it's scientifically proven to be much bigger and more significant in young people
i'm 17 and i feel that addiction to numbers drama can be fun for young people too and anger and rage
is sometimes better than no emotion at all now i don't know anything about the people behind these
fake mysteries channels other than what they do but what i can tell you is that they're probably
young and the fire that brews from the impulsive action to carry out such a sick thing to do yeah
easily overpowers any consideration of the potential consequences and that's not an opinion
that's literally math the part of the brain that specifically considers the implications
of decisions matures far slower than the part that merely makes decisions anyone could be manipulated
into doing or believing something evil we've seen that throughout history but young people
are especially vulnerable now there are two types of hacking ones that exploit flaws in software and
ones that exploit flaws in human behavior although videos like this can help spread awareness to
eliminate the second method software hacking can still very much happen to you that's the purpose
of vpns they protect you from anything that could steal your data which you may not worry about
until it's too late you see your ip address with all your information is public that's why when
you go on sketchy websites like this you see hot singles in your area and it like says your town or
you go on omegle and this guy knows your name and address like there's no why this guy's that smart
that's because accessing your ip address is sometimes easy which is why i recommend
nordvpn the sponsor of today's video last time i juggled during an ad read you guys watch more of
it so we're doing it again vpn acts as the middle ground between you and the internet keeping your
data safe and private what it does is it allows you to switch your location so you can trick the
ip address into thinking you're wherever you want you can use that to trick potential cyber hackers
by hiding your true location or for accessing things you shouldn't be able to so for example
if you wanted to watch back to the future which is not on us netflix you would just switch your
location to australia and then there it is so go to nordvpn.com jack orton link in description to
get a two-year plan plus a bonus gift for a huge discount so if you care about your
safety or if you just want to get free movies i highly recommend nordvpn i use it all the time
so thanks again in rppn for sponsoring the channel if you enjoyed this video subscribe
because i take parts of the internet and pop culture and explain what you can learn from them
all the time and you don't want to miss any upload and also let's try to share this video
to get the attention of youtube so they can hopefully fix the brand channel feature to
provide more information on what these roles actually mean and get minecraft player 1.0
his channel back don't forget to ring my like button and subscribe to my bell and as always