Ripple Sues YouTube Over Cryptocurrency Scam Videos (reuters.com) 27
Blockchain firm Ripple sued YouTube on Tuesday, alleging the video-sharing platform failed to protect consumers from cryptocurrency "giveaway" scams that use fake social media profiles to dupe victims into sending money. Reuters reports: The company says scammers on YouTube have been impersonating Ripple and its chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse, to bait viewers into sending them thousands of dollars worth of XRP, a cryptocurrency championed by Ripple, according to a court filing. The scammers promise to send back up to 5 million XRP, worth nearly $1 million, but victims who participate in the fake "giveaways" never receive any money in return, said the filing.
Ripple says it wants the case to be a "call to action" for the social media industry to stop their platforms from being overrun by fake accounts and misinformation. "For every scam, giveaway, fake conspiracy that is taken down, multiple more pop up nearly immediately," Ripple said in a blog post. "YouTube and other big technology and social media platforms must be held accountable for not implementing sufficient processes for fighting these scams."
Ripple says it wants the case to be a "call to action" for the social media industry to stop their platforms from being overrun by fake accounts and misinformation. "For every scam, giveaway, fake conspiracy that is taken down, multiple more pop up nearly immediately," Ripple said in a blog post. "YouTube and other big technology and social media platforms must be held accountable for not implementing sufficient processes for fighting these scams."
awww (Score:2)
umm... (Score:1)
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Umm.... failed to protect people from being fucking idiots,,,, how is that the fault of Youtube?
Alphabet Inc, is accepting money in exchange for running illegal advertisements. Last I checked, fraud was illegal no matter how stupid or clever the victim. Yes, Alphabet Inc is not off the hook entirely for this one.
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So, they make people drink Ripple (Score:1)
so they get drunk enough to buy into cryptocurrency?
Ripple is a scam (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Ripple is a scam (Score:2)
Re:Ripple is a scam (Score:4, Informative)
Ripple [ripple.com] is not like Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. It is a centralized system controlled by a company which has already signed deals with companies all over the world, such as American Express and MoneyGram.
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May I suggest that "primary use" is more correct? Paying off fansomware, for examply may not be a scam. It may be simple extortion. Hiring a hitman is also not, per se, a scam, though it is a felony in most jurisdictions.
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Hiring a hitman is also not, per se, a scam, though it is a felony in most jurisdictions.
They're never real hitmen anyway. They're always FBI agents. I wonder if you could sue them for fraud and false advertising, since they advertised a service they never intended to carry out?
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Nope. They are LEOs lying to serve legitimate law enforcement activities, not for personal gain. Basically you would be suing for damages from failing to fulfill a contract that all parties understood was not actually enforceable. The court will throw that claim out, because there never was a contract, as per the traditions of English Common Law.
IWBNI (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be nice if YouTube and other platforms could do what Ripple's asking. But they can't. There's simply too much content posted every day to review all of it, and automated moderation systems are well-known to either miss a huge amount of content (if set for a reasonable error rate) or to over-moderate and block huge amounts of legitimate content (if set tightly enough to catch the majority of bad content). Ripple's demand is nonsensical given reality, and Section 230 immunizes YouTube completely exactly to prevent platforms from being caught in the bind Ripple's asking they be put in.
actually, they could. (Score:5, Insightful)
they could have someone who actually takes a look when they receive 1000 notices on a video not actually being from Microsoft because the channel was a hijacked channel about making antique carriage wheels. so it was super obvious. any employee who would have taken a look at it would have known instantly.
this went on for more than a week. the streamed video promised to give back more bitcoin if you sent bitcoin in, posing as bill gates. they did this same thing apparently on hundreds of channels with the same streamed content and it would have taken all of 20 seconds for someone who can understand english and had finished high school to notice that the streams would have needed to be shut down.
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on the other hand If I post a video with xxx on it or copyrighted music, that stuff will be claimed within hours if not minutes. the xxx will be removed.
and look it would have been SUPER DUPER MEGA SIMPLE to check all the channels that had their channel name changed to Microsoft during that week.
they(youtube) did return the channel that I was aware of at least into the proper hands though - but it took them so long. a lot of people reported it and it was super hyper obvious that it was posing as an official microsoft channel. and it wasn't _that_ obscure either. also the whole thing was on newspapers for days before youtube bothered to do a lookup for channels named microsoft.
yet movies they manage to delete quite quickly if they're reported. if they're claimed then instantly.
also none of the reports you can do on youtube are actual dmca filings so they're ripe for abuse. the way the system works as it is that it's open for abuse but looks incompetent otherwise. basically you can't make normal reports about something being a scam and have someone actually take a look at the content. that's just not how they do. they also don't check if it's identical to other scam content. that's just something they don't do. what they do is compare it against copyright markers, song detection databases etc(which are also broken as f because it can't discern the performer and usually doesn't give the performance to the original performer, but for whoever coverband put it in first).
Really Gates should have sued them over not taking the scam streams down.
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they could have someone who actually takes a look when they receive 1000 notices on a video
You need to look up and understand the term "Joe Job". Wherever you set the threshold for viewer-controllable signals for scrutiny, you're just guaranteeing that bots and crowd-sourced responses will push any video anyone doesn't like to that level... leaving the platform with an impossible-to-review number of videos meeting the criteria, same as before the threshold was set. Basically, user flags are a weak signal in many cases. Not an irrelevant one, but a weak one.
on the other hand If I post a video with xxx on it or copyrighted music, that stuff will be claimed within hours if not minutes. the xxx will be removed.
Yep, because it turns out to be easy
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And Ripple reported these scam, right? (Score:2)
I'm going to side with the big media giant on this one. Has Ripple reported all of these scams, and Youtube refused to remove the content? Nowhere does it say that Ripple tried to get these channels removed. I do agree that Youtube should remove blatantly illegal content if they can identify it, but once they start policing via order by government, then they become liable for anything that falls between the cracks. They already have a system that removes illegal content.
Ripple should be policing Youtube and
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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If it was, Google would have fired the entire leadership of YouTube a while ago for how they put things like Nazi-hunting over consistently refining the quality of their advertising mechanisms so they put ads where they belong more consistently.
My wife watches a lot of youtube, and it annoys the crap out of me how they always stick ads mid sent-BUY FLEXSEAL!-ence instead of just waiting 2 more seconds for the speaker to finish.
They are kind of right (Score:2)