YouTube has always been slow to react or stop obvious scams on their platform. One of the most known and easy to detect youtube scams has been some channels (potentially hacked) streaming some crypto talks and offering their potential victims easy profits if they send bitcoin or other crypto coins to their wallets. Even after multiple people reporting these scams, they would still be up and running for days if not weeks. While YouTube didn't really pay needed attention to such scams, some people would lose their assets if they ended up believing these scams. One of the common excuses platforms like YouTube can come up is lack of resources to monitor all published content all the time.
Scammers have upgraded their schemes with deepfakes now. Not only they are using the AI technology to create deepfakes of famous people or leaders of crypto projects to deceived their potential victims, they are doing so utilizing YouTube's ads system. They are paying YouTube to run their scam ads. Just today I sponsored content with deepfake of Michael Saylor, which was saying that MicroStrategy was giving away bitcoins to celebrate the year or success. Those who want to participate, need to send some bitcoin to their wallets for which QR code is visibly shown. I saw the same ad twice last week. Even Saylor and MicroStrategy posted a warning that there is deepfake scams happening, and MicroStrategy or Saylor has nothing to do with them.
Yet, YouTube is still running these ads and collecting the fees. What excuse YouTube can have this time? While it is reasonable to argue that YouTube can't monitor all content all the time, but wouldn't it be negligence if they didn't review the sponsored content for which they are getting paid? I don't even think they would need staff reviewing these ads. These are so not sophisticated ads that automated tools could easily detect the fraud. It makes no sense with all the resources YouTube and Google has they would allow such basic scams to take place on their platform, especially when they are collecting fees for these ads. Now not only platform users get to see this content, but also forced to see in the feed because they are sponsored ads, and YouTube loves to place ads for all content consumed on their platform unless users pay monthly fee.
Something is definitely wrong here with what YouTube is doing. I hope they will figure it out soon before many keep losing their money to these scams. Sad part is the fix for this would be very easy. I am surprised YouTube internal tools did not catch these scams before being posted as ads. Or maybe they did, and just don't care.
There will always be those who utilize new tools and technology for defrauding others. Same has been the case with crypto, same will be the case with AI tech. We already see this happening with utilizing both AI deepfakes and payments in crypto. This bad actors always bring negative reputation to innovation because of possibility of such frauds. My example from YouTube isn't even a sophisticated one. Most people would detect the scam here. But more sophisticated scams and schemes will emerge as these bad actors continue using their creativity to deceived and defraud others. Companies seems like won't care either. It may have to be up to altruistic minded people and communities to build tools that detect fraud and prevent such scams from taking place or being successful. It may have to be up to decentralized systems and networks to build tools that benefit people, and make it difficult for fraudsters to advance their schemes.