Introduction: How to Prevent Getting Scammed on YouTube
In this Instructable, I will be going over how to avoid getting fooled by one of YouTube's biggest problems. Scamming. Scamming is the process of fooling a person or persons into buying a fake or broken objects, giving information away, like credit card numbers and other personal information, or to get a virus on your computer.
Step 1: How to Tell a Real Comment From a Scam Comment. Look at the Details.
In the first picture, I point out the real comment/YouTube user and than identify the scammers. (bots) How can I tell just by looking at them? Well just look at the second picture. See any common things going on? They both use special characters suck ass those black arrows and the black boxes. They also use bold words and than put links in the comment. The special characters and bold text is used so a user exploring the comment section will notice it. In some cases, like in the first picture, they'll use another bot/profile to comment on their scam saying it worked so it can give people a false sense of safety.
If you are not sure if its a bot or not, look deeper. in the two last pictures, I hover over the names of the YouTube user's name. Doing that will bring up some details about the channel such as if your subscribed to it or not, how many subscribers they have, if it's a verified user or not, and how many videos they have uploaded. In the third picture, I point out the details of the real YouTube account. On the fourth picture, I point out the stuff that is different from the actual YouTube account.
Step 2: What to Do When You See Someone Scamming?
What you'll want to do is report them. With enough reports of the channel by multiple users, YouTube will shutdown that channel.
- First you need to report the comment.
- Than you'll need to go to the scam channel and report it.
- After that, tell others to report the scam channel.