Indian Supreme Court recovers YouTube account from XRP scammers

The Supreme Court of India regained control of its official YouTube account shortly after it was hijacked by cryptocurrency scammers selling fake XRP investments.

On Sept. 20, the Supreme Court of India’s YouTube account was used to broadcast a livestream video about fake XRP ( XRP ) investments featuring Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

The hackers rebranded the channel to resemble Ripple and deleted all previously uploaded content, as shown in the screenshot below.

The hacked YouTube channel of the Supreme Court of India. Source: YouTube

The streaming platform took down the compromised YouTube account on the same day it was hacked. The Supreme Court of India concurrently issued a public notice about the incident, stating, “This is to inform all concerned that the YouTube channel of Supreme Court of India has been taken down.”

Supreme Court of India issued a notice about the YouTube account’s temporary closure. Source: Supreme Court of India

The hacked YouTube account is not fully restored

In a follow-up update on the same day, the Indian Supreme Court announced that its YouTube account had been successfully recovered from the XRP hackers.

Supreme Court of India confirmed the successful recovery of its YouTube account. Source: Supreme Court of India

However, further investigation by Cointelegraph revealed that YouTube could not recover the channel’s original subscriber base of over 217,000 followers and video uploads. Moreover, the channel was renamed to ‘Vansh’ and had only 15 subscribers.

The hacked YouTube account of the Supreme Court of India has not been fully restored. Source: YouTube

The cached information on Google Search confirms that the recovered account belongs to the Supreme Court of India despite the mismatch post-recovery.

Google Search cached search results for the Supreme Court of India. Source: Google

Related: Indian crypto exchange WazirX struggles to recover funds 60 days after hack

During Apple’s iPhone 16 launch in September, YouTube was flooded with livestreams featuring deepfakes of Apple CEO Tim Cook that shilled crypto scams.

Source: BearPig

YouTube’s support team acknowledged the scam in a Sept. 9 X post, urging users to report the video in the official reporting tool. 

The sham videos were taken down, and the associated accounts are now closed.

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