Scammers and fraudsters have been targeting YouTube creators with sophisticated email campaigns. The emails pose as legitimate notices from Google which claim to be a copyright report and possible strike against the channel. These include a Google Drive link to the purported report, which actually contains a malware payload designed to hijack the user’s Google account.
One of these phishing attempts was sent to HotHardware today, which was thankfully recognized for what it was before getting too far. Unfortunately, a friend of our site, Aaron Leong, was not so lucky a few weeks ago. Aaron runs a tech review channel called GearUP with Aaron with over 16,000 subscribers. After following the deceptive email, his entire channel and Google Account were hijacked.
After his experience regaining access, Aaron decided to share what he learned to hopefully help others not fall victim—but if you do, he has also kindly detailed all the steps he took with Google Support to reclaim ownership. While this situation is about bad actors targeting YouTubers, the recovery steps also should work for anyone with a hijacked Google Account whether they use YouTube or not.
The following is Aaron’s account of what occurred.
YouTube Copyright Strike Spoof – How It All Began
It started with an email on August 23 that looked legit, seemingly sent from YouTube. The email looked exactly like other YouTube emails with the proper sender email address, template, header, and graphics. The title of the…
