YouTube Likes Scam: Check the WhatsApp messages that made woman lose Rs 27 lakh in ‘YouTube like’ scam – Times of India

In another work from home scams, a woman in Pune lost Rs 23.83 lakh to cybercriminals. The woman who works as an ophthalmologist fell to the lure of good returns on performing simple online tasks such as liking some YouTube videos. The woman lost the money during a number of transactions she made between March 28 and April 22.
According to the FIR filed, she received a message on her WhatsApp number about a ‘work from home’ job offer and offered good returns. The woman decided to apply for the part-time job. The fraudsters offered her simple tasks like to click the ‘like’ button on some videos on a video-sharing platform. She was paid Rs 10,275 for the same. Post this, the fraudsters offered her to do prepaid tasks and promised her more income by asking her to invest money in their scheme of cryptocurrency. She transferred Rs 23.83 lakh to two bank accounts while the fraudsters offered her trivial tasks. Later she decided to withdraw her cryptocurrency investment but the fraudsters demanded another sum of Rs 30 lakh from her to release her payment.
WhatsApp scam messages promising
This is how these job scam messages on WhatsApp look like:
“Actually I am looking for a part timer who can earn 150-5000 rupees a day.”

” Let me explain first to you our project. To show you how we work. I will send you two YouTube videos. You don’t need to watch the full videos, just click like take a screenshot then send the screenshot to me and you will be paid 150 rs.”
“Give it a try, you will not lose anything here, feel free to dislike the video once you didnt received your payment.”
How ‘YouTube likes’ fraud works
Incidentally, this is not the first such case. Last month, a woman in Gurgaon was cheated of nearly Rs 11 lakh by fraudsters on the pretext of hitting likes for YouTube videos. “I received a message on WhatsApp for a part-time job in which the sender stated that the task included subscribing to certain YouTube channels and liking their videos,” the woman said in her complaint filed on Friday.
The message further asked her to contact another number if she was interested in the job offer. “On April 13, I got my first task. The accused shared a link to a Telegram group that had 185 members. Many of them shared screenshots of their transactions and earnings from this part-time job. Initially, the accused asked me to invest Rs 5,000 and after the completion of the task, I received Rs 6,440. So, I was assured that this was not a scam,” the woman further told the police.
Earlier this year, daughter of a Lucknow-based businessman was duped of Rs 27 lakh by cyber fraudsters who promised handsome returns on investment in digital marketing. The woman was approached through WhatsApp and offered her a job in which she had to ‘like’ YouTube videos. She was paid a good amount for promoting videos of the YouTubers, which the fraudster claimed were his clients who wanted to generate more ‘likes’ for their shows.