Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is suing YouTube for allegedly allowing scammers to use images and videos of him to defraud people.
The scam, similar to one used in a Twitter hack, requested people send cryptocurrency, falsely promising they would receive twice as much back.
Mr Wozniak accused YouTube of failing to deal with the problem.
YouTube and Google have been contacted for comment but have not yet responded.
The complaint alleges the “vast” scam is continuing on YouTube, with tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency stolen.
As well as Mr Wozniak, the law firm Cotchett, Pitre and McCarthy is also representing 17 others affected by the fraud, from the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, China and Europe.
In a statement, Mr Wozniak said: "If YouTube had acted quickly to stop this to a reasonable extent, we would not be here now.
"YouTube, like Google, seems to rely on algorithms and no special effort requiring custom software employed quickly in these cases of criminal activity.
“If a crime is being committed, you must be able to reach humans capable of stopping it.”
Google has a similar problem by allowing plagiarisers to make money from stolen content. It is smart enough to know where content was first published, however they generally allow site-rippers to steal content then use Google ads on those pages. Taking an excerpt and posting a link to the source is fine, but not whole articles that are being presented as the site’s own content. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is some class action lawsuit against them at some point in the future…
This is very amusing. “Stolen”? How is the BTC stolen exactly? It was a social engineering scam, nobody was actually able to reach into people’s virtual wallets and take money from there without them approving it first.
“Stolen” is a gross misrepresentation.
This is true but good luck actually reaching a human in Google. They deliberately made sure this is very hard and they act like the untouchables. Unfortunately it seems they are untouchable indeed.
Stolen in the sense that they had no intention of fulfilling the promise
I do see Steve’s point, people using his (and lots of other famous people’s) photos to endorse products - it’s just worse when it’s connected to an outright scam. This is why I don’t post my photos on sites like instagram, they are like a candy store for identity thieves!
I guess similar is happening on YouTube, but rather than using people’s official accounts, they are using people’s images to make the ads/vids appear to be affiliated to famous people. A bit like taking a famous sportsperson’s image and using it in a marketing campaign for some cheap trainers or something.
Similar happens for propaganda on social media, people take an image of someone and add a quote to make it look like that person said something they didn’t…
Because it’s their platform… they are essentially ‘publishing’ the material. Also they make money off the vids.
It’s like if someone took videos or photos of you and posted videos on YouTube saying you endorse some scheme (which turns out to be a scam). You’d probably want to sue YouTube for publishing the videos - especially if you report them and they continue to stay up…
Except youtube’s not a publisher, they are platform, which does have huge legal differences. Youtube has nothing to do with the content posted on the site unless it comes from official users and/or channels. It’s like suing your ISP for bringing the content to you, or suing the ISP of the person who uploaded it for letting them upload it. It makes no sense… o.O
And yet I heard that people who hosted TOR exit nodes got sued for “letting child pornography go through their computer”. You could literally be persecuted if you want to help Tor (by hosting an exit node) but somebody uses Tor for illegal purposes. But no ISP ever got sued if somebody used heavily encrypted connection to do terrorism or download child pornography…
The powers that be really don’t like people being able to make their own decentralized networks. The future looks grim.
“Stolen”? How is the BTC stolen exactly? It was a social engineering scam, nobody was actually able to reach into people’s virtual wallets and take money from there without them approving it first.