 I was staring at my desktop for a whole minute and I was like, wait a minute, something bad's happening right now, I just know something bad just happened. This video was sponsored by Surfshark, more on them later. If you guys saw my video with the Sea Rabbits, reliving the time I almost fell for an email scammer's tricks, oh my god I have some updates for you. Over the last couple months, I have actually found out exactly what these scammers were trying to do to me. And as you probably guessed it, it wasn't anything friendly. If you missed the original video though, link is in the description so please check that out so you're up to speed. This video was going to be a direct follow up to that whole situation. Once I had uploaded the Getting Scammed online video, I was checking the comments section constantly in case somebody had a similar experience to me. I was hoping that maybe someone would be able to tell me what the scammer was really up to and what damage I had actually managed to dodge, but nothing. There were some great comments though, not going to lie, for example. Reading your comments is always the highlight of releasing these videos, but alas, nobody had any information to offer about the topic. Or actually, maybe alas, isn't the right word there, let's go with… thankfully. I'm glad none of you guys have had any run-ins with scammers like this one. A few days passed and I was browsing my social media for some quality memes and I happened to check my DMs. I was surprised to find a message from a creator who I personally watch and I'm a big fan of, but the message itself was even more surprising to me. After checking out the original video's comments some more, I noticed some people helpfully pointed out another creator who had a similar experience to me. I checked out the video they made on the topic and I couldn't believe it. Exact… same experience as me. I wanted to speak to her. She confirmed with me yet another big creator who fell victim to this scam. I've since spoken to all three of these guys and I figured that a nice conclusion to this story would be to hear their side of the story. What's your scammer offering the same brain deal as mine? A game promotion for Epic Games? I have had a fake Epic Games reach out to me multiple times actually, but that's not the ones who scammed me. The ones who actually successfully hacked me and scammed me was a company for a game called Ever Forward. They were offering me $2000 to $4000 to play their game on a video and publish it in two days. They wanted me to get this positive done in two days. Usually I have a week or a month or two months, but two days? That was a little suspicious, not gonna lie. While yes they did also offer me a brain deal to promote their game, it wasn't the same company. Instead it was called quote unquote big game studios which I've never heard of before. No, they were actually offering something called Space Team. I should have seen this coming that this was a scam, but I was stupid. It was like a video editor. I don't even know. The thing that's funny is this is actually a legit game. You can go to Steam and they have Ever Forward as an indie game on there and that's what confused me at first. I was like alright, if it's on Steam I guess it's legit. I guess this company isn't really a scam, it's nothing to worry about. Did you have any hesitation before you opened the file or were there no clear red flags from them? Honestly, this was probably one of the first emails I've gotten with this format. So there weren't that many red flags other than there being a downloadable file. I was kind of like okay, why? There was definitely a lot of red flags. The grammar was off. Their message, obviously they did not speak English as their first language and it all just felt very unprofessional even though they were trying to come off as professional. Which is kind of ironic actually. Nope, I didn't really hesitate at all. At the time nothing was really red flagged to me because this was my first time doing something like this so I didn't really expect anything bad to happen. Big mistake on my part. Back to the thing where they wanted me to do the whole video in two days. That alone is so ridiculous. I should have just never responded to them after that. I should have deleted the email and never responded. But I was just, I don't know, it felt like a challenge almost. Two days? I was like alright, let's see if we can get this video done in two days. And I kind of wanted to make a video for them. They were like an indie game company. I thought maybe, just maybe they really need some sponsorships and they're rushing because the game is going to be releasing soon. After you had opened the file, what exactly happened? After downloading it when I clicked on the file and tried to open it, literally nothing happened, despite several attempts, which I thought, hey, that's kind of weird. So I messaged the people and then they said they would fix the issue within a few days claiming that it must have been my PC's fault that the file was not working, which was a lie. I grabbed the file, I put it on my desktop and I double-click it and guess what happens? Nothing! Nothing happens! Like, literally nothing. I guess my cursor moved around a little bit and there was a flash on the screen. But then that's it. There wasn't any game. There wasn't any video. There was no program. It's just silence. I was staring at my desktop for a whole minute and I was like, wait a minute, something bad's happening right now. I just know something bad just happened. My credit card just got leaked or my password just got found out. So for some reason I just decided, okay, yeah, this is trustworthy, sure, it's a demo to the video editor. I was going to try it out. After I opened it, literally nothing happened. My mouse just loaded and then nothing. It's really important to keep safe when speaking to people online and the same goes for you when you're browsing. That's where you need Surfshark VPN, today's sponsor! Surfshark is a powerful VPN which helps you keep your online identity safe by encrypting all the information between you and the World Wide Web. This way, corporations can't use your information for their gain and hackers can't get a hold of your device and data. Phew! Ever wanted to visit London? Boom! Change your virtual location and your laptop is now over there having a nice vacation thanks to Surfshark while you're still stuck at home. Aw, don't be sad though, little guy, this is a good thing. With your VPN set to the UK, you can now access all the media content from that part of the world. From the comfort of your own house. That's the fun stuff though. Now for the serious stuff. Surfshark secures your personal information even when you're out and about using that sketchy free public Wi-Fi. This is where hackers love to hang out and find new victims, but guess what? They're only able to find people who don't have VPNs. So you know. Links below to get started with Surfshark VPN! A VPN makes sure that your city, country and download history aren't linked to your identity. So head to the links in the description to get 83% off plus 3 extra months for free when you use the code jelly. 83% off plus 3 more months free with the code jelly. When did you realise the hackers had access to your information and passwords, etc? I was suspicious of that, but the moment I knew for sure is when I opened Google, I went to YouTube and I found that I had been signed out. So when I tried to sign in, it said, you changed your password two minutes ago. I did not remember changing my password. I knew I didn't change my password and somebody else had changed it and honestly that scared me a lot. Like at that moment I knew I had messed up big time. The worst possible thing in the back of my mind came true. One night I was in my bed and I grabbed my phone because I was going to scroll through YouTube and stuff and then when I went to login it said that I couldn't because the password is wrong. So I told my boyfriend about it and then he said he would be right back to check on it and then when he came back he told me that I was hacked. Well that mainly happened when I got a notification that my password was changed and that was obviously not me so yeah it was kind of concerning. They changed my phone number, they changed the backup email and the backup email is how we knew it was them because the backup email was literally their company name. What emotions did you feel when you had this realisation? Anger, sadness, confusion, but I'll tell you one thing I didn't feel, I didn't feel happy. Happiness was not one of those emotions. I was confused, I didn't know what was going on and then I was just disappointed but at the time I was actually working on a big video so that was kind of my focus. When I realised that I was hacked I freaked out. I mean I was literally about to go to bed and fall asleep while watching YouTube. It was 11 at night so I couldn't even call anyone for help for support. I literally woke up my sister and dad while they were sleeping to tell them about what happened and I was just freaking out and crying and hyperventilating. It was really hard for me to fall asleep that night. I was very confused, I was panicking, I was trying to figure out what exactly I'm gonna do if I could get my channel back, how I would get it back, I really was just in a state of panic. Do you have any idea what they wanted your account for? Was there a specific motive? I assumed they just wanted my account to promote their stupid bitcoin scam because a few days after I was hacked that's when they streamed an Elon Musk bitcoin scam on my channel which didn't really make sense to me because I didn't really think that would appeal to my audience of Roblox players. What they do with their channels that they hack is they try to scam other people because what they did with my channel was it used to be named MV Perry right? Well they changed it to PayPal US. They changed it to PayPal. The main motive was just promoting other people's videos. Nothing really more than that but let's just say people were confused. And then a week after hacking my channel PayPal US starts streaming. It's a live stream trying to get people to donate money to them. After 10 minutes or something the live stream was ended and my whole channel got terminated because all my subscribers could tell something wasn't right. This is not MV Perry. This isn't the channel they subscribed to. So they mass reported my channel and my channel got terminated. I was actually very very dead inside when that happened because when my channel was still up but I didn't have access I thought okay at least I can regain access. But now it was terminated and I thought it was over. I thought this was the end I give up. My channel just got deleted and I'm gonna have to start over from the very beginning. How did you manage to get your accounts back? How long did this process take? So I let people know on Twitter what was going on. I got in contact with Google support and I remember it took 10 full days for everything to come back which might not seem like a lot but at the time it felt like forever. I'd say I definitely got my account back through awareness being spread. I made a post on Twitter telling people what happened. I got a hectic ton of support from creators and people in the Roblox community. If it weren't for all of that I definitely would have been waiting a much longer time to get my account back. So to get my account back the first step I took was I went to Twitter and I immediately started tagging Team YouTube asking them guys please please save me please help me. Eventually they got me in contact with their internal team on their email so I started emailing back and forth but it got to the point where I was only going to get a response every two days and the response was something stupid like did you remember to turn off your caps lock? Yes YouTube. My channel got terminated you got to do more than this is not enough. Eventually after three weeks of these tedious back and forth emails YouTube finally sent me a wonderful golden email that said we found that you are the original owner of the channel and we are going to restore it and all the videos on it. Sorry for the inconvenience something like that. Since the hackers changed all the information it took a little while to verify that it was me I'd see it throughout the whole process it took around two weeks which actually isn't bad at all. It was overall just a learning experience. I will never ever accept a sponsorship if it has a red flag. I won't accept it if it has half a red flag. That's if it does anything suspicious whatsoever. I'm just gone like I'm not taking those chances it's too much of a risk and I suggest that to all YouTubers or anyone who is trying to become a YouTuber. If you're getting weird sponsorship emails and something seems a little bit off even just a little bit do not trust it it's not worth the risk of losing your channel. The hacker smells like doggy doo doo. If I was in their situation I too would be so upset and definitely would be freaking out. I find it really cool to see the creators audiences as well as other creators like work together to try and bring the channel back. Just seeing all the support on other social medias is just really cool. Really wholesome. I'm also really glad to see that these guys didn't lose their channels or their previous videos. And to other creators out there who may be watching please be aware of these scams um these people have no life. Again huge thank you guys for being so open and for offering an ending to an otherwise unfinished story.