Google taking months to shoot down large-scale crypto scam

Internet scams have been around since the Internet truly went global. They range from Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns that fail to deliver products to buyers to e-mails and ads prompting the user to install a malicious application or Web browser extension disguised as something genuinely useful, or making them disclose their personal data such as social network passwords, bank card numbers, social security number and so on. While it's reasonable to expect dodgy websites such as YouTube video downloaders to pull nasty tricks of exactly that kind on visitors, the online advertising king (Google) is not immune to them, either.

YouTube ads for what's presented as an easy way to start making lots of cryptocurrency daily by just setting up a 'bot' have been omnipresent lately. Some of them look relatively credible. Clicking one takes the user to a YouTube video, several minutes long, of a person claiming to describe a breakthrough way to make money online. The interesting part is, the people in these videos appear to be AI-generated, the accounts used to upload the videos tend to eventually disappear, and rather weird Google accounts are employed to place the ads (even if it always says 'Identity verified by Google').

The videos (and the descriptions found below them - please scroll down to the Sources section for a sample link) urge the user to install a certain Web browser extension, run a piece of code and do several other things that are all supposedly required to set up the magical 'AI bot' that will somehow determine what to sell and when automatically, generating huge profits in SOL or ETH or some other cryptocurrency out of thin air.

Now, I am not a software developer and my coding skills are virtually non-existent, so it's hard for me to say exactly what the piece of code does. What I can say is this. My common sense has been screaming in a high-pitched voice that no one gives money (or the knowledge how to obtain money) for free. That making money out of thin air, without doing anything, isn't really possible. That advertising campaigns cost money. That videos of AI-generated people promising insane profits can't be a good thing.

I tried reporting these videos to YouTube using different YouTube accounts but Google would just send me a generic e-mail saying that no breaches of ToS were found. Actually, with Google Search becoming less usable with every passing year and news such as '25% of Google code is now written by AI', this comes as no surprise. My only desire here is to warn Notebookcheck readers against trusting these ads.