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Woz Sues YouTube Over Bitcoin Impersonation Scam

The Verge reports that, in conjunction with other famous tech entrepreneurs, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is suing YouTube for failing to police scam videos featuring his likeness. In the videos, the scammers promise that Wozniak will return double the amount of Bitcoin sent to a certain address. Other similar videos reportedly use the likenesses of other tech leaders, including Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

Bitcoin scams have been popular lately, most notably in the recent mass Twitter hack, in which hacked accounts of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Kanye West, and others promised the same thing: a doubling of whatever Bitcoin was sent to a certain address. It exposed a major hole in Twitter security, and apparently netted the perpetrators over $100,000. If you’re interested in the details, Brian Krebs has a detailed analysis.

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Comments About Woz Sues YouTube Over Bitcoin Impersonation Scam

Notable Replies

  1. I have a Feedbin “action” setup to will look for any article that mentions “Steve Wozniak” and automatically mark it as “read”.

    I still tend to see stuff on Twitter, though… usually it’s Woz giving his opinion about something at Apple 35 years after he left the company (“Woz hates ‘natural scrolling’” or “Woz thinks Big Sur looks terrible” or “Woz held a puppy”), and I’m always left wondering why anyone still cares what Woz thinks about anything related to Apple.

    At least this news item isn’t that. But I’m still not sure it raises to the level of something we need to know about.

    (Note: I may be a little extra cranky today. Don’t take any of this personally, either Josh who wrote the article or anyone who likes Woz.)

  2. I find this post ironic since that’s what Woz is asking Google to do for videos that contain both “woz” and “bitcoin” :wink:

  3. I still keep http://woz.org/ on my RSS feed list, but most of the time it’s just links to places where Woz was mentioned in somebody else’s article. When he takes the time to write an actual article about technology, however, it is usually interesting.

  4. One of the reasons we chose this article to link to is just as a small warning about Bitcoin scams, both on YouTube and on Twitter. I wouldn’t expect TidBITS readers to fall for such things, but sometimes it’s good to call it out a little more.

  5. So “Ian Restil,” the “big bad bionic boy” of 1997, Stephen Glass’ most outlandish of all his fake news fabulations that were published but never fact checked by The New Republic, really does exist:

    I highly recommend watching the very entertaining film “Shattered Glass” about the scandal, especially since the perp that was invented over 20 years ago sounds a lot time the kid that just hacked Bitcoin.

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