Two YouTube channels of content creator Ranveer Allahbadia (also known as BeerBiceps) were hacked by crypto fraud-promoting miscreants. Allahbadia hosts interactive sessions with Indian celebrities, spiritual leaders, and politicians, with a collective subscriber base of over 12 million.  Following the account breach, both of his channels were inaccessible to him, according to the creator. Meanwhile, the cybercriminals replaced related logos and images with those of Elon Musk and Tesla, and deleted all of the videos that were published on the channels. The scammers soon began to promote a crypto fraud scheme as well, using Allahbadia’s account.

YouTube has since restored access to Allahbadia’s channels following the breach. In the meanwhile, the hackers managed to display crypto schemes to entice viewers with promises of 200 percent returns. The hacker soon started a livestream on Allahbadia’s YouTube channels, featuring photos of Musk and Donald Trump. A QR code was displayed on screen, which when scanned, redirected users to a fake Tesla-inspired website. This website also featured a giveaway worth $100 million (roughly Rs. 836 million) to the participants, a report by Crypto.news said.  

Crypto scammers are using more sophisticated methods to take advantage of unwitting users, FBI had said in a recent report. In this incident as well, the hacker displayed a calculator that let users check how much will they receive in return if they invested a certain amount in what appeared to be a donation for Trump’s presidential campaign.  

“We welcome you to the official event from Elon Musk and Trump, this event was created to popularise cryptocurrency, to participate you need to send cryptocurrency to any wallet (BTC, ETH, DOGE, SOL) you see on the site, we will multiply the amount sent by two and return it to your wallet,” read a message displayed on the fake site created by hackers.  

Subscribers noticed the suspicious activities on Allahbadia’s channels and started posting about it on X (formerly Twitter).  

As per the report by Crypto.news, the streams of one of Allabadia’s hacked channels had exceeded the mark of 149,000 at one point – indicating that multiple people could have risked being scammed.  

This is not the first time that such an incident has happened. Earlier this month, YouTube was spammed with deep fake videos of Apple CEO Tim Cook, promoting a crypto fraud scheme.