 Hey everybody, no, don't adjust your dials, we're back, it's been quite the 48 hours, let me tell you, maybe even a bit longer, because I'm not specifically aware of when exactly it happened, but my channel, Nintendo Prime, got hacked, I know how it was hacked and I'll get into how it happened, and I have a lot of thoughts on the process in dealing with YouTube, or the lack of dealing with YouTube, it's a really confusing process from, I don't know, is Google now a trillion dollar company? I don't know, they're one of the biggest companies in the world, so it feels a little inexcusable that it's this difficult. Now we are back and that is good, and you know, if you don't want to watch this whole video and see what happened and maybe if it happens to you what you can do about it, then just know that hey we're gonna have some news videos, probably at least one news video maybe coming later today, I know this isn't the greatest angle, not everything set up correctly right now, I mentioned in some prior videos I'm doing some work around the studio, so it is what it is, but I wanted to appear on camera for this video because this has been maybe some of my most stressful days as a YouTuber, and this includes when YouTube actually took $4,000 from my channel last year, we'll maybe talk about that a bit too because I don't know that it's related, although I'll explain the customer service situation there. That being said, there are some people wondering, you know, what's happening with the giveaways, so I did a stream where I gave away new copies of games, it's gonna be a bit before I get to some of those games to give away, I apologize to those who won, this situation caused even a freeze on one of my bank accounts, it's really been a pretty messed up thing, so that being said, let's get into what happened and what this means moving forward and yeah, we'll just, let's just get into this. So I think it was two days ago, at this point maybe it's three of my days of running together, I haven't had a lot of sleep, my channel was hacked, I didn't know what happened, I suddenly woke up after getting my kids on the bus and everything, got a whole bunch of messages on Twitter and Discord, because we do have a Discord server, I'll link it down in the description, and I'll link my Twitter as well because by the way, I do a lot of direct communication on Twitter and Discord, not as much on YouTube because it's not really that kind of platform, so I got a bunch of notifications that, hey your channel's hacked, hey what happened, hey hey hey, and I had no idea what was going on and then we saw this, this is at least one image I have of it, my channel was renamed to Shiba INU, yeah, and there was a live stream going on that at least the last I saw it, it's been deleted, was at 180,000 views and this live stream went on for 7.5 hours and featured Elon Musk and it's actually a spam video, it is a cryptocurrency illegal video, I hope nobody fell for the cryptocurrency thing, I literally hope none of you watched that stream and thought anything they said mattered, for those who don't know, Elon Musk actually is aware of this specific video, because it's happened on a number of hacked YouTube accounts and he's actually offered up a public $25,000 reward for any information that leads to the discovery of the people who created this so he could obviously sue them to oblivion and all that jazz and make them pay for misrepresenting himself, because what he said in there has nothing to do with the actual cryptocurrency situation, so that's fine, good on Elon Musk, one of the smartest and richest guys in the world, but what does a small YouTuber like me do about this, my immediate reaction is obviously let me log back into my account or go through account recovery and deal with that, so I tried to do account recovery myself without talking to anybody at YouTube and of course it didn't work, I kept saying my devices didn't belong to me, they changed the recovery email, they changed the recovery phone number and made it impossible for me to get back into my account, which I thought was interesting because it used to be, this is how it used to work on YouTube, when I changed my account recovery email, it required me to verify at that email address that it was being changed, but YouTube apparently changed somewhere along the lines where you no longer have to verify your email change, so without verifying that change, they could just freely change it to anything they wanted and I can't get access back, again YouTube used to not be this way, I know because this channel used to be under a different email account before I moved it to my Nintendo Prime email and yeah there was a bunch of verifications required for the backup email address, so it's weird to me that now four years since I did that, that now you don't have to verify email changes, this would actually go a long way to me not needing to get YouTube involved in this situation because then I could manually recover my account, unfortunately YouTube doesn't force requirements or confirmations at the old email address for email changes, so this is where we are today, now moving me on whole of that, I obviously immediately went to account recovery, there is a form on account recovery that you can fill out, I filled out the form with the information I had, but the funny thing about the account recovery form is it's not exactly easy to find, they don't have, you know, you go to the Google YouTube help section on their website and it doesn't really get you to the proper form very easily, so I thought I filled out the right form, turns out I didn't, so I didn't know what to do, here I am, no way to do a live chat because live chat functions are locked behind an account I can't get access to, so I can't live chat for help and I can't do anything about getting a proper form submitted or so I thought anyways to get help, in addition to this there's no customer service number and there's no true path to understand who to talk to about getting your account back, if you get your account hacked it's a scary thing because you don't know what to do, so I reached out to of all the YouTube channels on Twitter and I knew to reach out specifically to at Team YouTube because last year we actually dealt with a situation where my channel was blowing up over Super Mario 3D All Stars, some of you might have even subscribed back then and according to them you're all bots and they took $4,000 in revenue away from the channel claiming that all my views were bots, even though on my end all of the evidence I have for all those views was from the recommended page by YouTube so it appearing on the homepage and being recommended to people is so is how I got all the viewership that month but they claimed it came from an outside website aka I bought it which I didn't do so that makes literally no sense to me but whatever I dealt with the slow of the slowness of the responses and the emails and all that and honestly it all started by actually getting a hold of at Team YouTube on Twitter I can't remember who suggested that I reach out to at Team YouTube at the time I did that and yeah to long story short I never got that money back it was a really crappy time I even got demonetized for a little bit it was so stupid but life moves on so I knew because of that situation that you know what reach out to at Team YouTube on Twitter they actually usually respond at least within the same day and I encourage a bunch of people to retweet and help me get their attention because they obviously have you know millions of potential creators you know on Twitter you know DMing them and and all that stuff so trying to get through the crowd usually requires a lot of pings from the same channel so they got a hold of me through DM and we exchanged some details and then they got me to the proper forum and then apologized for the form being so difficult to find they said it's something this particular person responding to me actually mentioned it's something they're aware of and trying to do better with but whatever so I fill out the form and then you're just stuck waiting right because the form is basically a thing that's going to send all your information that you have about your channel and about what happened to a generalized email address that is probably got thousands if not millions of emails in and you basically just sit and wait your term for someone to get around to it and respond so that's that right couldn't really do much else so in the meantime I decided obviously we need to rectify how the hackers got in now I cannot confirm with 100% certainty this is how it happened I'm just fairly confident it is so for those who don't know I this studio this is at home and I often leave my computer on because it does updates and all that while I sleep and sometimes my children wake up before me and decide to come into my office usually to try to grab my switch or something like that but they usually don't have any interest in touching my computer but this particular night I happen to leave my email open now email being open isn't that big a deal one of my children can't even read and the other kids have no idea what any of the emails mean so I I don't really think much of it so there is that's like the extent of my mistake left my computer on and left my email open but someone was clicking around in my email I know this because there was a bunch of emails that were unread suddenly were read and one particular email was open that I was 99.9% sure was a fishing attempt I don't click on links from places that I don't know even if the place sounds legit and in this case the place was banned labs which is a real application but also could entirely be spyware on its own I don't know so the thing is my children I firmly believe clicked on the link in that email and ergo the hackers gained access to my computer and were able to get a cache file I found this out by the way from another youtuber thank you so much by the way there was a number of even large youtubers reaching out to me in private I'm not just wishing me good luck but you know ones that went through similar situations that have a better understanding of how this happened so I can help prevent it so the thing is there's a cash file logged on your computer if you're logged into YouTube that's a master cache with that cash file anyone can log into your YouTube channel doesn't matter how many authentication methods you have because if you're currently actively logged in at the time yeah and I wasn't by the way at the time that they clicked on this fishing link I wasn't actively logged in but clicking on that link obviously put something on my computer that you know you call the key logger but it really wasn't logging keys it was going through specifically to find a certain cash file for my YouTube channel so then that that day when I logged into YouTube but bam they got the cash file so I went through the the authentication myself to log in and then but as soon as I did they had that cash file now they didn't go at it right away probably realizing that I just logged into the account so if they attempted to hack instantly I would have noticed and and got the channel shut down really super quick but they waited basically until I there was no activity on the account and then yeah took it over what which meant I wasn't at my computer anymore so that's how they got it my response that is I completely wiped my computer I did some malware and elder sweeps and stuff but it didn't really turn up anything which by the way you can have malware and key loggers that aren't discoverable in a traditional way you can go through you know it they can embed themselves and programs on your computer and anyways the point is I wiped my entire computer into a fresh install of Windows 11 so yeah there shouldn't be any loggers anymore literally all my hard drives were wiped the hard part about making a decision to wipe all my hard drives because I have like seven of them is I lose pretty much everything that isn't on this laptop and because of the compromise nature of the desktop I was not willing to take any files off of that computer and put them on here so there are some files I'm missing right now as an example you guys want the background to my youtube channel right the the image that says you know says the channel name and tells you the things we do yeah that was all on the desktop and I was unwilling to grab any file anything off of that computer imported on here so if it wasn't already on here I no longer have it so all my raw footage is gone all of my stuff for the stream that the stream next blank it's all gone all my sightings for it voice mods gone you know that there's just a lot all my all my video files all my stream files so I can't even set up my live streams the way I used to have them everything is gone because I didn't have backups off of that computer now I had redundant backups on the computer I had backups on two different hard drives but again for the sake of being safe I was unwilling to get the files off of that computer maybe that was overkill but since I didn't know exactly where this thing was on the computer I wanted to wipe everything I wanted no risk after getting my channel back that they could just take it again because that would be pointless and we'd just be in a loop with YouTube where they just keep calling me idiot for allowing this to happen okay so I get an email response from them 12 hours later and this is like in the middle of the night like 3 a.m. and I just happened to still be awake because I when I was waiting for a response to I'm super stressed out at this point because this live stream was going for seven and a half hours I was losing lots of subscribers my channel was gone I had no access to it I knew the stream itself was something that was illegal and I had no other way to deal with this no nobody at YouTube telling me this is gonna be okay even people telling me that they've dealt with this in the past not everyone was confident it would be okay because there were people that got hacked that never got their channel back so I was literally left in limbo not knowing what was gonna happen so I get the email and they basically say look we locked down the account and here's how you can recover it went through the recovery process which was a bit more painful I think than it would be or so I didn't realize this I don't know when YouTube told me this by the way there's a master document inside your account that gives you like 10 of these codes apparently and you can hard recover any account if you have these 10 codes now they can only be used once and once they're all used you don't have them anymore I didn't realize that those codes even existed it was never communicated to me and I've read all the licensing agreements when I signed up for YouTube thing is does you sign up for YouTube like a decade ago before he was owned by Google's I have no idea about these master codes whatever I have the list of master codes now but it was it was anyways so it was a bit of a pain to get the combat but then it was all good I thought everything was fine I went to the channel I changed the name back I changed the profile picture back I you know notice that they actually took a majority of my channel and said it's unlisted so I set all those videos back to public which for some ungodly reason led to YouTube sending out thousands of notifications to everyone who was subscribed and then deordering my videos in fact right now I think my videos are still out of order for most of you they're in order for me and I think they're out of order for everybody else and that's to me is just ridiculous that that's how that happened these videos were already published before why are they getting new notifications sent out and YouTube are you telling me if I'm not getting notifications sent out for a video I should just unlist it then send it public again is this really how your system works because if so that seems a little ridiculous to me but whatever that's neither here nor there so here I thought everything was fine we got a few things set up on the channel and I went to bed because it was like 4 a.m. at this point and I'm exhausted so I wake up when you get my my children off the school and then decide to go deal with some stuff around 9 or 10 o'clock and all of a sudden oh my channel is gone I go to log in your channel has been terminated no communication from YouTube by the way and why I was terminated they confirmed I was hacked literally like you know six hours earlier they confirmed that my account was hacked they know it happened they helped me recover it and then poof took the channel away with no communication on why or what to do so I knew that there isn't a way to appeal terminations there is a form that you can Google and fill out basically search and fill out for channel terminations and to dispute them I did that the problem is every time I went to submit the form because it's all automated yeah they don't have any way they won't basically won't let my form get submitted they kept claiming my Nathan at nintendoprime.net email was not associated with the Google account never mind the fact that email is a Google account because it's a business email through Gmail so I thought that was weird so again I was kind of left in no man's land not knowing what the hell I'm supposed to do so again knowing that I do get a response from at Team YouTube I reached out to them they took a few hours to get back to me on Twitter and they told me oh man that really sucks that shouldn't have happened I suggest since that form is because they initially sent me that form I told them it doesn't work for me and they said well then we suggest emailing back the people who contacted you originally about the account thing which was a just a generalized email and then to tell them what happened so I did so a day later they finally respond and they asked for some details they say oh we're sorry that happened and they go into some more details essentially the reason the channel got terminated was automated the hackers attempted to get back into the account now they failed to get back into the account because the master cash file they had before was no longer valid because the information in the cash file had changed I have a different password now which I don't even know what it is that's how complicated the password is the last password was really complicated to and took me a long time to memorize but whatever so the passwords really complicated the backup the the two-factor authentication is no longer an app on my phone it's a direct text message to my phone and obviously I changed the backup email and everything so the thing is they told me that the hackers attempted to get back in could not get back in and that tripped their automated system to terminate my account suspicious activity sure let's just terminate even though we have communication that it was anyways neither here nor there and they asked me for more information to verify I am who I say I am the funny thing is the information they're asking for is information I already given them to recover my account in the first place so why do I need to give them the exact same information again I didn't understand this process it made no sense to me I clearly confirmed at my backup email that I am who I am already that's how I got the account back so why do the same people do I have to reconfirm that information and then wait again for a long email so four hours pass and then early this morning they sent me another email in this email they said thanks for the information will pass us to our internal team and get back to you well they still haven't gotten back to me but the channels back originally when the channel came back I didn't have access to it now I do I don't really know what's happening they could rip my access away at any moment because they might determine that hey you know this is the hacker again I I don't know all this to say I've been very stressed out not knowing what was gonna happen all I know is I've been very stressed out over the last two days pulling hair you could talk to my fiance about it sometimes she ever comes on she can let you know how stressful it's been I just started you know the second half of my semester in college right now so I didn't need this kind of stress I didn't need to wipe my computer because I also had school files on there that I no longer have because I can't trust them so I lost homework progress this week it's just been it's been a really rough thing and what sucked is one of these days of the day that the hacking happened was the day my mom was taking the kids after school and taking them overnight so it was supposed to be a stress-free time unfortunately it turned out to be the exact opposite I'm assuming everything's fine and I get it set up I will do a live stream tonight and we'll chat about things even further in more detail all I have to say is that YouTube you need to be able to do better it I take full responsibility for how I got hacked I definitely need to shut down my computer at night even though I like having the updates done in the morning because sometimes they take hours to do whatever I will definitely shut down my computer in the future my kids don't even know how to log on my computer once that happens so that'll take care of that so it doesn't happen again I just I'm frustrated okay with YouTube this is something that could have been solved in a three-minute phone call how does a multi-billion trillion dollar company not have a better way to communicate with them by the way communicate on a platform where I make them money for those who don't know they take 30% of everything well they take 50% of ad revenue so whatever I make they made the same amount on their side so when I'm having a really good month so is YouTube and then they also take 30% of super chat revenue so for those who don't know YouTube takes a cut of everything so I'm paying them now I understand it's their site their services they don't charge me to be here but I'm paying them lots of money making them lots of money and in return this is the customer service experience for a content creator now yes if I was a bigger channel I probably would have got serviced quicker which shouldn't be the case but is all they would need to do is have a call center where people could call in and I understand the call center would be flooded I understand to be hours away I you know what guess what I had to wait three hours on the phone for customer service from Samsung and I did it and I was glad that at the end of that three hours I talked to a real human it makes a difference Google everything can't be automated I love technology and automation can help in some cases like sure have your forms and all that and have that be automated but you should have a way to contact customer support directly and actually talk to a human you know how much less hassle there would be and how much quicker you would solve people's inquiries a three minute phone call I guarantee you there was more than three minutes spent reading emails and sending them back and forth to solve all of this and obviously dealing with multiple people of the YouTube team including on their social media channel like guys just let me call I'll wait all day if I have to but at least at the end when I talked to a human this would have been solved like that no problem no termination no no up count contact oh now your account's gone none of this none of this stress needed to exist if you would have just let me call and talk to you all right folks I'm Nathan Robojans from Nintendo Prime yes some giveaways are still going on people want to know about the Metroid Dread stuff might be pushing back build the final entry date for that yet we'll see what happens because as I mentioned earlier at some I want my bank account got locked up from this because after they got access to that I didn't know what else they got access to because I had payment details on YouTube so I locked up my bank and my bank is going to take like two weeks before it unlocks and I have to get new cards and it's just a it was it was a precaution I did I did it to prevent fraud I needed to protect myself and my family of course so that's why I can't like there's some people who won like Mario Party today I can't get it to you because I don't have access to the bank to pay for it sorry should be rectified here in a couple weeks but yeah we're still doing our giveaways everything's gonna be fine we're gonna return to normal around here and I hopefully after today I never need to talk about this again but it was not a fun situation moving forward I do have a second channel called Nathaniel Rumpel Jants I will link that down in the description that's just my name go subscribe to that YouTube did tell me that if this happens again they're not gonna take out a second channel I have so if we can grow a second channel alongside this one that gives me another place to give updates to more directly than you know making you guys follow on Twitter and stuff obviously you're here on YouTube you enjoy YouTube so go subscribe to that channel I can do updates there and videos there who knows maybe if it gets enough subscribers maybe I make separate content there that's separate from Nintendo stuff but thank you guys for all the support and all the kind words there's only been a few jerks out there trying to like poke at me and so some of our followers know who those jerks are that were that were trying to you know pile on me while I'm down but we're back and as far as I know everything's back to normal sort of not in studio because I lost everything but alright thank you guys catch you in the next video