Experts Warn Against YouTube Emails Serving As Phishing Scams

YouTube is sending out a warning to all of its users regarding a new phishing scam. It may seem like it was generated by the popular video-sharing app but the reality is far from that.

The phishing attack makes use of the company’s real email ID, and that may trick some people into wrongly assuming that it belonged to YouTube. Therefore, the app is really urging them to be more observant before it’s too late.

The news comes after one content creator shared screenshots of the suspicious email that he was getting. It appears to display a new video that has no thumbnail and seems like it’s from YouTube’s team. Furthermore, it covered a series of changes that YouTube has made in its policies.

The app’s advice regarding this news is for users to exercise greater vigilance and not download any such files if they see similar emails that entail links to files on Google Drive.

But it’s quite clear that those that are more careless and less vigilant would seemingly fall into such traps as they would be led astray into believing that they’re legitimate. Do we blame them, no? It’s coming from the company’s legitimate ID so what else can we say.

In the thread, the creator speaks about how this is actually being allowed. And it would not be wrong to call it an abuse of the app. He provided some guidance and that entails disabling such features which continues to drop in popularity in the past.

On the other hand, the app says it’s now letting out a new support article which users can read as it details how to stay safe while navigating against such types of suspicious emails.

Some victims may opt to ignore these types of emails by chance. And that has to do with how least bothered they can be about the app making changes to its terms and conditions. To prevent this, these phishing emails add a new sense of urgency.

So some people might wrongly assume that they’ve got a limited time period to respond before their content is removed or their account is suspended. Hence, they rush to open the links and get trapped.

There is also that fear that perhaps the monetization of the content may be affected too and that is another way by which such malicious behavior is able to win, leaving creators in a vulnerable position.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World