Fake ‘Apple Crypto Event 2022’ attracts 70,000 viewers

by Arthur · September 8, 2022

Apple held its “Far out” special event yesterday to announce the iPhone 14 series and a number of other things. However, someone who tuned in to watch the event on YouTube saw a completely different event: a fake “Apple Crypto Event 2022” with clips of Tim Cook talking about cryptocurrencies with “URGENT NEWS” to share.

The stream was first discovered by The Verge and YouTube quickly removed the stream once The Verge’s the story was published. While many people would have noticed this fake stream’s red flag right away, that wasn’t the case for everyone. In fact, at one point the stream had tens of thousands of people watching.

The stream was titled “Apple Event Live. Apple CEO Tim Cook: Apple & Metaverse in 2022.” In reality, the video was ripped from an interview Cook did with CNN back in 2018. The host of the stream simply added logos for Bitcoin and Ethereum to the video and covered the CNN logo with the “URGENT NEWS” banner.

The obvious context here is that interest in Apple and Tim Cook was incredibly high yesterday, and this channel saw an opportunity to cash in on that attention. Apple held its “Far out” press event to announce the iPhone 14, and Tim Cook was also scheduled to be interviewed at the code conference a few hours later.

It seems that one of the reasons this fake live stream got as many viewers as it did is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The description of the video was full of keywords relevant to Apple and new products such as the iPhone 14. The Verge’s Jay Peters explains:

I came across this stream because it was recommended on my YouTube home page – it may have been in part because I’ve been watching Apple videos from the event throughout the day. When I first started seeing the fake stream, there were about 16,000 viewers, and just before I published this story, the number was almost 70,000.

Clicking on one of the links in the video’s description took you to some dodgy cryptocurrency websites where users were encouraged to “buy” things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Presumably, the streamer hoped viewers would see Apple’s apparent “Crypto Event 2022” as a reason to believe Bitcoin’s value would increase.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time crypto scammers have used Apple events as a ploy to gain attention. We saw a similar situation last year where a fake Apple event stream on YouTube attracted over 30,000 views.

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