Recently, I was watching a video and I was scrolling through the comments and I noticed a particular channel which wanted attention and views. It was swearing, a lot. Don’t worry, I hid the swears.
Looking at the channel, it was even weirder. The home page had a few videos on it:
but the “Videos” section had nothing.
And, a message in the “About” section with someone swearing even more.
Also, if you look at the date, it seems like the person (possibly stolen channel) joined in June 24 2021. That’s a bit of time, (this post was made in 2022, Jan) and even worse is how they steal the channels.
Sometimes, they use their stolen channels to target you (These are html edits on comments).
Something like this:
Usually, they will message you in your video’s comments and ask you to friend them and use their “free/no copyright music and royalty-free tracks”, but that’s the scam. By using their music which they create, which is copyright and upload it to your channel, they can ask YouTube to give them full control of your channel. This happens in an automated process. They can generate hundreds or thousands of fake accounts, and usually they post garbage videos on the channel and sometimes even delete the original videos. They now have an army of accounts, and can do anything with them. They can be sold and used for liking or disliking videos, and as normal Youtube channels.
How can you prevent this from happening to you?
First, don’t trust commenters with such stuff. You never know what is their intention, until its too late.
Second, if you want non-copyright music, look it up yourself on YouTube, not from a comment.
Third, if you want stock videos or images, try pexels.com.
2. Exploring these channels
As you read above, these are stolen channels and rarely do they get their videos deleted. This channel (Sound City) looks like a similar channel which is doing the exact same thing, XimerTracks. This is an old channel which works just like Sound City. They rarely delete videos and just fill the channel with garbage.
Here is just how many spam channels there are:
As you just saw, there is another Sound City, same logo:
and here is a picture of it:
This is also a stolen channel, with only one video, which is NOT EVEN THIS CHANNEL’S VIDEO! This leads me to believe that there are tons more and that its getting worse.
There are no videos, the home page is linking another channel, which is owned by Sound City, because there are no videos in the video section.
Lets click on one of them:
Another SOUND CITY! But not with the same logo.
The entire video, called “Mr Beast Exposed!”, is just a picture and a laughing sound in the background.
Lets explain this Sound City.
This one seems to be the original, with an SC logo instead of an S, and all of the videos are there.
Maybe not, because these could have just been multiple uploads on different channels.
Here is a picture of the Home, Videos, Community and About page:
The channel seems Russian, like all of the others. Russian text, Russian images. This one joined in August, 24 2014. It seems to be an old channel, with 14.6 THOUSAND SUBSCRIBERS? Those have got to be FAKE ACCOUNTS considering the 8 VIDEOS that he has. As you can also see, he has 595 842 views WHICH IS WAY MORE VIEWS THAN AVERAGE SMALL CHANNELS GET.
I will probably make a full investigation of this channel and all of the other channels, next time.