Jim Browning
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2023
21:14 · 3.3M views · Jul 30, 2021
Scam-baiter Jim Browning explains how he fell for a phishing email and ended up deleting his own YouTube channel. He walks through the circumstances and prior incidents that made the scam convincing.
Cited as a cautionary example that even security-savvy people can be phished, especially in threads about hacked or terminated channels.
4 comments from Hacker News
Not me or any individuals I know of (luckily). The above 60-year-old in family do not do any online financial transactions. When they need to do it, they usually ask the younger ones. Also, when they get random messages about renewing their insurance/warranty or some similar stuff, most of the time they cross-check (verify) it with the younger ones. 1.) Recently, there was an instance where I could have drained my cryptocurrency wallet. Usually I bookmark the defi domains and visit the sites via bookmarks. But that day, for some reason, I used a search engine to visit the site. The first or second result was a fake domain very similar to the real one. I visited the site and was just about to connect my wallet when I looked at the domain. I always look at domain related to cryptocurrency/finance/etc before login/connecting wallet. Due to it, I caught that the domain was part of a scam. I should not have used a search engine to visit the site, took my lesson and never did it again. 2.) Few months back, out of nowhere got a customer support call that your laptop warranty is about to expire so renew it and then started talking about the packages. In the first minute itself, I thought this must be a scam. So politely told him that I think this is some type of scam, later on I will visit your website or desktop application and see it for myself, and renew it I want to. He understood what I was trying to say and did 'Ok, Ok , but make sure to visit our website and renew your package
this video Jim Browning is an expert in this area and is sort of famous for his "scamming the scammers" videos where he hacks, tricks, annoys, or otherwise scams scammers. In the linked video he talks about how he was tricked into deleting his account. These things can happen to anyone, even experts.
A lot of YouTube channels are getting hacked recently with the same "sponsorship offer" hack. Wonder if this was the case here as well. Paul Hibbert got hit recently. This video has more details on this works and how the bypass 2FA : this video
This is what happened to Jim Browning (YT channel about scammers... very entertaining). He was tricked into it. this video