If you see any of the following YouTubers sending you a comment offering you prizes, cryptocurrencies, or some kind of direct message connection, it's very likely a scam. See below for details.
A popular YouTube scam involves rogue actors pretending to be popular YouTube accountholders, and then sending a reply to a comment saying something like "I'd like to help you earn more money, message me for more." They link to a phone number or instant message account impersonating the YouTuber, and then attempt to scam you out of money or information.
YouTube seems unwilling or unable to tackle the problem, and despite how obvious the scam might seem, innocent YouTube viewers are falling for it.
So the aforementioned YouTubers have committed to never, ever send anyone messages in the comments promising them cryptocurrencies, or asking to chat in a third party private message platform, or anything like that.
This is not a legally binding contract between any YouTuber and any other party, or anything like that.
We're simply creators on YouTube that are irritated with the platform for not doing enough to stop comment spam.
Easy. If you have more than 5000 subs, just link to NoScams.tube somewhere on your YouTube profile (either on your page, in a video description, or in a community post) and post a comment on GitLab issue asking to be listed. Make sure to let us know where you posted the NoScams.tube link.
I'll also take merge requests so long as the comment contains a reference to where you posted the link to NoScams.tube.
I haven't built automatic validation for this, so I have to manually approve anybody who wants to join. I'm sure you understand- validating content creators is likely several full time jobs. :/
Besides, this is mostly impacting channels with larger subscriber counts. Not exclusively, of course, but from what I can tell, the problem's mostly on accounts with thousands of subs. I think the real solution involves YouTube- this is a stopgap written by a geeky mom with a YouTube channel.
I'm Veronica from Veronica Explains, and I made this website after getting annoyed with YouTube scammers pretending to be me.
As far as trust- I can't answer that question for you. But you also can't trust scammers in the comments, so there's that. :)
You can check out the source code for this little page here.