These YouTube creators, hacked by scammers, have yet to recover

Nearly a year after his YouTube channel was hacked by crypto scammers, Steve still thinks about the ordeal every day. "I’m scared to leave my browser open," he says.

Steve, along with his wife, Danielle (who are withholding their last name for privacy reasons), launched Vegas Action in 2020, chronicling their wins and losses playing poker and blackjack at Sin City casinos. The couple wanted to highlight their love for Vegas while also showing the reality of gambling (aka, the house always wins).

The channel was demonstrating steady growth until it was hacked in April, after which it was shut down by YouTube. After numerous entreaties to Google, which owns YouTube, the channel was finally returned to Steve and Danielle's control a month later. But by that point, it was losing subscribers and momentum. Now at 37,000 subscribers, Steve and Danielle hoped at this point they'd be north of 50K.

"Our sub growth is now 30 percent of what it was a year ago," Steve says. "We’re struggling and trying to hang in there and be positive."

As for the hacking itself, Danielle describes it as "traumatic."

Discovering the hack

The scammers got control of the channel by posing as potential advertisers for Vegas Action. Specifically, they claimed to represent the popular translation service Duolingo.

"Some of our viewers are from other countries," says Danielle. "There are people who watch and don’t speak English. It seemed kind of a neat opportunity."

"We thought we were working with an advertiser to do an integration," Steve says. "We hadn’t done one in a long time, so we said, ‘Ok will do this. We need the extra revenue [to cover for the upfront costs of the channel]. It’ll help pay for airfare and other expenses.' I was having issues with them, and I clicked on something I shouldn’t have, and it took over."

Soon after, the scammers got control of the email account Danielle used for the channel.

"[The scammers] couldn’t do anything until I logged into the email, and then they got my password," says Danielle, who used two-factor authentication to log in. "They changed some things. We noticed within an hour and took the email back, but they had made themselves a parent to my email. So, no matter what, they could get in."

Along with realizing their email had been hacked, the couple soon learned they couldn't log in to their YouTube channel.

"We gave YouTube a warning that we’ve been hacked," Steve says. "Over live chat, of course, because we couldn't get an actual person there to talk to."

That night, the scammers completely took over Vegas Action and launched a livestream, pitching crypto to Steve and Danielle's tens of thousands of subscribers. Soon after the livestream launched, YouTube shut down the channel entirely, making it impossible to find even through search.

Steve and Danielle were devastated, and tried to get the word out to their subscribers via social media. As the channel's deletion stretched from days to weeks without any word from Google, the couple launched a new channel, but much of the damage was done.

Getting the channel back online

The couple filed help tickets and sent emails to Google's feedback address, but received only automated responses. In speaking with other gambling creators, Steve and Danielle discovered that several had also been hacked by the Duolingo impersonators but had regained control of their channels after a week or so.

After seeing their plight on social media, Brian Christopher, a gaming YouTuber with over 750,000 subscribers, reached out to Steve and Danielle. Not long after connecting with Christopher, YouTube returned the channel to their control, with no explanation.

Steve and Danielle believe Christopher spoke to his contact at Google about the Vegas Action hack, and that may have sped the channel's return.

"If you’re a big channel on YouTube, just like if you’re a big player at the casino, you get a [human] host," Steve says.

Boot Bullwinkle, Policy Communications Manager at Google, tells Mashable that YouTube doesn't attach a specific subscriber minimum to gain access to a human contact. He directs hacked creators to visit this Google page immediately to report the problem and chat with an AI assistant (Steve says they reached out to the digital assistant but never received anything helpful).

Steve and Danielle have no idea who took over their channel. Bullwinkle declined to state how many YouTubers are hacked every year.

Advice for other creators

Steve and Danielle say they still get solicited by potential advertisers that appear to be scammers. They've only done one advertising partnership since the hack, with a company they've worked with already.

"It’s kind of booted us out of doing [partnerships,] because we’re scared," Danielle says.

The couple recommends using a new email address when launching a YouTube channel and to be very wary of clicking anything, especially if it's from someone unfamiliar.

"Take note of email addresses," Danielle says.

The aftermath

After regaining their channel, Steve and Danielle returned to regular posting and increased their uploads to at least five a week. YouTube regularly tells its creators that consistency is key to growing your channel, according to Steve and Danielle, who noted that even missing a day of posting affects their subscriber and view counts. Being offline for weeks was catastrophic to their growth, they say.

"We were down for a month, so some people either go elsewhere and find other things to watch, other things to do, and they forget about you," Danielle says. 

"And there are so many new [gambling] channels doing tables like we are," Steve adds. "They’re popping up left and right."

During the days before they got their channel back, Steve and Daniel had some long discussions.

"We did talk about walking away [from the channel], because if we don’t get it back, how do we start from scratch?," says Danielle. "We put so much money into it. For several years, it’s a huge loss because you’re not making anything."

Ten months after the hack, the Michigan-based couple remains committed to their channel and subscribers. But the hack changed everything.

"We were talking seriously about eventually moving to Vegas, possibly this year, before the hacking," Steve says. "Now, those plans are just gone."