Meet the Actors who Unwittingly Facilitated a Scam by Appearing in Dubious Video Ads

Amidst rising scams that use social media platforms to target unsuspecting victims, YouTube has been flooded with advertisements where people promote ChatGPT as a tool to generate passive income via Crypto. The video ads are made lucrative with the guarantee to earn up to $3,000 per day. Once a victim falls for it, they end up losing their entire crypto investment portfolio.

Use of flawless scripts

The advertisements circulating across the platform follow the same script with little variation. The advertisement features an actor who speaks about how a ChatGPT-based bot has helped them generate a good amount of passive income from their crypto investments. The actor in the video even cautions the audience about the vicious scams happening around the crypto market. Once victims bite the bait, they are asked to link their crypto wallets by copying a code.

The code at first glance looks harmless, but scammers have hidden their wallet address in the code by splitting it up, making it difficult for novices to discover it. Once the victims copy the code, they unknowingly transfer their entire crypto portfolio from their wallet to the wallet of the scammer.

Hiring actors to create a facade

Scammers hire actors who are given a script to read out, and they don’t have any background knowledge of the service they have been asked to market. In most cases, the actors even don’t receive the payment for their services and are left as shocked as the victims when they discover how they unwittingly helped scammers pull off a fraudulent scheme. The actors don’t have any control over when and where the video is used, and that harms their career as well.

News agencies contacted the actors to understand how the hiring process works. It was revealed that the actors are promised around $500 for a small video advertisement which looks too promising to avoid. But the actors are traumatized now since their faces have been used to commit a crime. Scott Panfil, an actor who was featured in one of the videos told a media agency “I’ve been contacted by internet security professionals, OSINT enthusiasts, [...] one victim, AND multiple people in my real life relationships that have had the video hit their feeds". These actors have been reaching out to YouTube to YouTube to get the videos down as soon as they discover one. But it has become a headache for them.

Fiverr, the freelance platform, that has been used to hire the actors has released an official statement to condemn the unlawful activity done by scammers. Fiverr spokesperson said “Any attempt to defraud or scam others is in clear violation of our terms of service and strictly prohibited. It is against our Community Standards to allow anyone to use services offered through Fiverr to promote intentionally misleading information or fraud, or that can pose financial risks for our users". These videos have received more than thousands of views, which raises concerns about the size of the scam. It becomes essential for the public to not interact or take action based on any advertisement they see on YouTube or any social media platform.