Cryptoscammers Held Parallel Fake Apple Crypto Scam Event on YouTube

A live stream of an old interview with Tim Cook was launched on YouTube simultaneously with the real Apple conference. The stream seemed to be an attempt to trick people who may be aware that Apple was having a big event on that day.

According to The Verge, the channel was seemingly being used to attract attention to a crypto scam — and when it was live, tens of thousands of viewers were tuning. The stream had plenty of signs of being fake. It had a strange title — “Apple Event Live. Ceo of Apple Tim Cook: Apple & Metaverse in 2022.” — and it was showing an old interview that CNN conducted with Cook in 2018.

The streamer added the Bitcoin and Ethereum logos to the video stream, covered the CNN Money logo with the text “Apple Crypto Event 2022,” and added bold text reading “URGENT NEWS” at the bottom. And if you actually clicked into the channel’s page (which claimed to be “Apple LIVE”), the URL didn’t have anything to do with Apple.

This suggests the channel had a different purpose at one point but was hijacked by bad actors and used to host the stream.