Scam and impersonation detection

Impersonation is the scam that costs your viewers money

The pattern is familiar to anyone running a crypto or finance channel: a comment appears under your newest video using your channel name and profile picture, congratulating a "winner" and directing people to a Telegram or WhatsApp account. Some viewers message it. Some of them lose money. The complaint arrives in your inbox.

This is also the category that generic spam filtering handles worst, because the text on its own is innocuous. There are no banned words in "Congratulations, you have been selected — message me to claim." What gives it away is the relationship between the comment, the account posting it and the channel it is posted on.

What RemoveSpam looks for

Detection is built specifically around YouTube comment scams rather than general-purpose text moderation.

• Accounts copying your channel name, handle or avatar
• Fake giveaway, prize and "selected winner" messages
• Cryptocurrency and trading scams, including fake investment returns
• Instructions to move the conversation to Telegram, WhatsApp or direct message
• Coordinated waves of near-identical comments from different accounts

Why your viewers are the ones being protected

A clean comment section is a reputation question for you, but an impersonation scam is a financial one for your audience. Removing these comments in seconds rather than hours is the difference between a viewer seeing a scam and a viewer falling for one.