 So I can't believe I even need to have this conversation, but I got to remember that we might have some younger viewers or we might have people who aren't as experienced with social media and the internet as I am. We have something happening on our channel that it's actually happened to quite a few channels. Actually what's happening is extremely popular on TikTok and Snapchat, but some people you know if you're on TikTok you don't really read the comments or comment yourself so you don't deal with this or see it. I know personally I don't think I've ever commented on a TikTok video. Most I've done is ever leave a heart. So yeah you know it's not something I've experienced but I've seen other people that I know use TikTok experience this and now it's happening on YouTube and it's something that I can't really do much to prevent. I do my best. I've been doing my best the last couple days to combat it and help protect you guys. But unfortunately because we especially do things like giveaways we actually have a giveaway going on right now for Switch OLED PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X winner of choice you know winner gets to choose whatever system they want. Lean.io link down in the description. But the reason I wanted to bring that up is because our giveaways are probably why this channel is targeted because it makes our viewer base just frankly more gullible and I don't want to blame anyone specifically but I have gotten dozens of emails and DMs across social media about this and people who have fallen for it. And what am I talking about? Well here's just one example I happened to screenshot. I delete a lot of this stuff and it says thanks for watching. Don't forget to hit that subscription bell and then it gives a whatsapp phone number. And this username in particular I've actually seen seven different ones. This one uses my thumbnail and then says pinned by Nintendo Prime and that's actually their username but they're doing that to trick people into thinking it's actually me responding to them. And what happens is they hit our comment section and they respond to every single comment. They can only respond it seems per bot that's doing this. They can only respond to about 70 comments per video. And right now YouTube is not doing anything to combat it. They are aware that this is happening, that this is the latest scam happening. And that's actually a nicer one where the bots asking you to subscribe but then also asking you to talk to them on whatsapp. And some people are gullible enough to believe I am handing out a publicly available whatsapp number so people can talk to me. Now they won't actually call you and talk to you so you can obviously figure out hey that's not Nate that's not his voice. What they're doing instead is just texting and yeah telling you that you've won giveaways and asking for shipping details and saying that hey you have to pay for shipping which for some of my giveaways you do have to pay for shipping so it can sound extremely believable. But I can tell you right now I've never once used whatsapp to handle any of my giveaways and I would never tell anyone to contact me on whatsapp. In fact I don't even have a whatsapp number at least not a public one. I have one whatsapp phone number that's private because we have certain sponsors that like to talk through whatsapp for some ungodly reason but we personally don't use whatsapp in any public capacity. So I can tell you right now anytime you see a comment responding to the tone that you've won contact me on whatsapp or oh subscribe thanks very much by the way contact me on whatsapp all they're trying to do is fish you get your address your phone number so they can send spam calls and spam mail to your house and also so they can try to convince you to send them shipping money which they are obviously just going to keep and the more you interact with these whatsapp phone numbers the more and more they're going to keep coming after us. The best thing you can do is report that comment right report it as spam and hope that YouTube's automatic AI starts to recognize that these comments with whatsapp numbers are bullshit. They're obviously impersonating me and making it as believable as they can without being my account and unfortunately because I'm not a channel with 100,000 subscribers I don't have a check mark by my name which would be a way to verify it and gosh knows the bot makers will eventually figure out we have a nintendo prime podcast channel and then start to make bots that use that to act like I'm talking to you guys with the podcast channel which happens now and then depending on what account I happen to be logged in you guys do know I do respond directly to comments here and there I don't respond to everybody because I just don't have that kind of time but frankly and I have to say this and I know it's going to sound mean I've had what a half dozen people tell me um that they think I scam them or that this is a scam and they're requesting that I give them their money back one person in particular requested over $300 that they sent um supposedly so I would ship them to PlayStation 5's that they won in a different country um I've only ever given away one PlayStation 5 that was back in January of last year now obviously we might be giving away another one this month but yeah to that I can only say I'm really sorry you got scammed but it's not my problem you for lack of a better word I won't name any names kind of an idiot these scam things have existed for a long time whether it's phishing emails whether it's you know weird text messages you know you get phone calls from from companies pretending they're collection agencies and they're not really collection agencies you get a whole bunch of this stuff happening to you throughout your life whether you're a teenager a child or an adult and you have to learn and self-teach yourself to recognize the difference anything that says pinned by nintendo prime is not me there is one pinned comment and that is usually my comment advertising giveaways or asking people to subscribe so every now and then I'll pin a fan comment but yeah I this is really out of my purview it is not on me to refund money that you got scammed out of because you followed a scam that happened in my comment section that youtube unfortunately didn't do a better job protecting now this is something I've seen other youtubers talk about over the last couple of months and they've suggested something that youtube could offer in the meantime that I would really prefer until they could deal with this and that would be the ability to turn off replies they aren't making a normal comment they're replying to people to make it look more direct and harder for me to track and take care of because while I try to read every comment reality is I make multiple videos sometimes five to ten videos per week plus live streams I'm not going to be able to catch everything I try really hard to but I'm not always going to catch it I'm not always going to catch it in the moment I could be doing other things with my children my fiance school etc and I'm not going to get to it and unfortunately that leads to a lot of you guys potentially getting scammed so I'm making this video as a general warning it should be obvious I am not ever telling anybody to go to WhatsApp just to chat with me we have a public discord server everybody a public discord server if I'm going to tell you to go anywhere to talk it will be there I don't hand out my phone number I don't hand out a whatsapp number my twitter my publicly available email and our public discord server that's it I don't have a special snapchat for you guys or a special facebook group you can join I don't have you know I am on instagram and tiktok but I don't tell people to really go there to DM me and talk to me so guys stop letting yourself get scammed and be smarter and I'm really sorry this is happening and I don't want to say it's your fault for falling for the scam but I do want to say I really make people aware of it and no I'm not the one doing it and I have no control over it and no I'm not going to be giving you your money back if you get scammed okay it's not my responsibility to do that all I can do is tell you I'm deeply sorry that this happened and obviously use it as a learning experience to make people aware that this is the thing going on on my channel and it's happening all across youtube by the way it's a very widespread problem and now that it's starting to get down to smaller content creators like me I can only imagine how many of the other channels you watch whether it's rgt swanwave andres restart etc that's going to end up dealing with this problem as well so please don't be dumb don't let it happen to you so the only time I'm going to warn you about it because it's out of my control and has nothing to do with me all right folks I'm Nathaniel Ruppeljantz from Nintendo Prime and hopefully I'll catch you in a much more upbeat video next time