Reckful's YouTube Channel Hacked To Promote Scummy Bitcoin Scam

Scam artists obviously don’t have the reputation of being the nicest of people. However, sometimes a scam occurs and you think that this time, even they’ve gone too far. 

Reckful was a YouTube star and Twitch streamer, who rose to fame as one of the world’s best World Of Warcraft players. He had almost a million subscribers on the platform before he took his own life in 2020, having spoken openly in the past about his struggles with bipolar disorder. Reckful is still fondly remembered by his community, and just a few weeks ago, many members got together to pay tribute to his life. 

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As spotted by Dexerto, on 18 April hackers gained access to Reckful’s YouTube channel, which remains up to honour him, and allows fans to continue to watch his content. As the channel is not uploading new videos, subscribers have dropped. However due to his popularity, it is still a very popular channel with over 300k subscribers. 

His channel began a livestream titled “Tesla CEO: Elon Musk will start pump Cryptocurrency / Bitcoin Price Prediction / Ethereum”. The channel’s name had been changed to Tesla [LIVE], and the picture had also been changed to the Tesla brand logo. This was to give viewers the impression that it was a legitimate Tesla giveaway.

Luckily, fans noticed almost immediately, and worked to notify Reckful’s moderators in order to regain control of the channel. Order was restored within a number of hours, however it left a bitter taste in many users' mouths. While these kinds of cryptocurrency scams happen from time to time, usually it is the creators themselves hoping to sell their own brand of crypto or NFT, despite them being worthless.

In this instance, hackers weaponised the memory of a beloved creator in order to get people to fall for their scams. While it is likely a bot created to display these livestreams, and not a targeted attack, fans still thought this attack was particularly disrespectful even for scammers.