Don’t Fall for YouTube Email Phishing Scams!

The e-mail scam is nothing new, but it's just as easy to click the wrong link or disclose the wrong information, and just like that, all of your data falls into somebody else's hands. The most recent is this spoof email, masquerading as coming from YouTube telling you that viewers were complaining about your spammy videos. But never fear, because YouTube will review your channel if you pass over all of this information in an email.

Yeah, rule 101 of scams: if an email makes you go, "Hmm," chances are it's a scam. In terms of scam emails, this is one of the better attempts at deception. The contact name suggests it's from YouTube Support, the images are on point, and much to my surprise, there are no glaring spelling or grammar mistakes. However, YouTube would never threaten to close your channel without referencing its comprehensive guidelines and policies, and like every single well-respected, trustworthy company in the world, they would not ask for details about your channel, or, indeed, your password.

Scam emails always encourage you to compromise the security of your data. And in another one of these dodgy emails that was supposedly from YouTube, they even tried to convince the recipient that they would need to disable two-step phone verification on their YouTube account. Seems legit…...

With all this in mind, we have two simple pieces of advice: Never send sensitive information over email, and if you receive an unexpected email, don't do anything directly from the email. For example, if you reset your password on any account on the internet, you may receive an email asking you to click on a link. And that should be okay, because it's an action you started, and you're aware of our email.

But if, for example, you receive an email out of the blue telling you that one of your videos has received a copyright claim, don't click on the link within the email, go directly to your YouTube channel and investigate the issue yourself. Because, as convincing as this email looks, who knows what this button actually does. If in doubt, dismiss the email, and always go to the source, which will tell you exactly what's going on.

We asked YouTube what information we should expect from an email, and they said that while they may provide analytics about your channel in emails, they would never ask for personal information, pin codes, or passwords. You should also check the authenticity of the email sender. Obviously, genuine emails from YouTube will be authenticated, and you can find more information via the help page on screen now, which you can read from the link in the video description.

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