Duration: 0:20

4,754 views

159

So you’re a fan of Five Nights At Freddy’s content and you used to watch some popular FNAF YouTuber and their content.

One day you decide to rewatch one of their videos for nostalgic purposes, only to be disappointed to see that someone else had taken over the channel, set the original content to “private” and replaced it with a single stream showing Elon Musk promoting a cryptocurrency giveaway.

Well that’s exactly the current state of Battington’s channel right now.

For context to those who have no clue of who the hell “Battington” is or need a refresher, he was a YouTuber who made these VHS tape like animations where several different animatronics or characters looked realistic in a way.

Recently, their channel was hacked by either a single person or a group of people who are cryptoscammers using the Tesla brand to trick users into watching their stream and entering their giveaway so they can pocket the cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum) sent to them by unsuspecting victims.

Battington is not the only FNAF YouTuber that this has happened to. It’s happened to FusionZGamer and there’s a likely chance it may have happened to some others as well.

Hopefully, Battington figures out a way to get his channel back under his control and YouTube boots these cryptoscammers to the curb.

YouTube may be a place of several things, but hacking someone else’s channel to pocket digital currency and using a stream centered on an influential person (even if they are controversial) to rip people off is not welcome here.

Update: So I’ve been informed by a couple commenters on this video that Battington’s channel was terminated due to violation of community guidelines.

Just know that this isn’t the fault of Battington, but those of the cryptoscammer (or cryptoscammers) who hacked him. 😤🤬

Update Number 2: Battington is currently in the process of working alongside YouTube to get his channel back. As of now, the channel is back, but it’s still under the “Tesla US” name. It may take a little while longer for his channel to be fully restored back to what it was before all this happened, but rest assured, a bit of progress is slowly being made.

Final Update: Battington is back!

Post Update: While we may see Battington’s return and regaining access to his channel as a “victory”, we’re not quite out of the woods with the Tesla Scammers yet. Upon reading another post outside of YouTube and watching a couple other videos on the subject and doing a little more digging, it seems that it would appear that the problem is much more worse than we thought.

Why?

Well, I spotted many more channels getting affected and the hackers came back by changing the names of the channels they affected rather recently.

But how do they keep coming back you may be asking?

Apparently, the scammers gain access to the affected accounts by sending an email to their targets under the guise of a reputable company asking for the channel owner if they’d like to accept a sponsorship of a game or some other service on their channel.

If you receive a sponsorship email and you find something suspicious about the links or files provided to you in it, do not click on them!

If you do so, you run the risk of losing access to your channel and everything on it as well as it becoming one of many of these “Tesla” scam accounts!

Here’s how you can spot these accounts and what to do to avoid falling victim to them:

How to spot a channel affected:

* All aspects of the channel such as username, handle and profile picture are altered. Though the number of subscribers and the date of the channel’s creation will remain intact.

* All the videos featured are either deleted or set to private and the only video showing up on the channel is a livestream featuring an old interview involving Elon Musk (whether or not it is on loop is dependent on the channel).

* There will be an absurd number of people watching. (Some people might be watching, but the majority will most likely be bots).

* The live chat is set to subscribers only and you can’t access it unless you have been subscribed to the channel for a certain number of years.

* Suspicious links will litter the live chat.

* The channel disappears after people start talking about them. (Either through auto-deletion or YouTube taking the channel down).

How to protect your channel and others:

* If you receive a suspicious email, don’t click any unknown links or files they contain. Purge the email immediately.

* Warn everyone about these scammers in whatever way you can.

* If you are the channel owner being affected, contact YouTube and do whatever you can to get access to your channel and everything on it back.

* Keep your eyes peeled for any red flags involving the scammers.

* Never click on suspicious links or files generally.

And that’s pretty much it…

And as for any scammers that may or may not be watching this video, don’t think you can pull the wool over our eyes. WE KNOW!!!

That is all.