Guide
Why YouTube’s spam filter misses so many scam comments
YouTube’s built-in filter is genuinely good at obvious spam: links, repeated text, known bad accounts. Scam comments are designed specifically to avoid looking like that. Here are the five tricks that get them through, based on what RemoveSpam removes every day.
By Dan, founder of RemoveSpam · Updated
1. No links
Links are the easiest thing for a filter to catch, so modern scam comments do not use them. In a sample of 200 spam comments RemoveSpam removed, none contained a link. Instead they name a coin to search, an “advisor” to look up, or a contact handle.
2. Lookalike letters
Words like “WhatsApp” are written with characters from other alphabets that look identical to a person but not to a filter: 𝖶𝗁𝖺𝗍𝗌𝖠𝗉𝗉. A blocked-words list compares exact characters, so it never matches.
3. Names that change every day
Fake-coin campaigns, 94% of the spam RemoveSpam removes, keep mutating the coin’s name: SPX85K, SPX89K, $$SPX85K, SPCX90K. Any list of names you block is out of date within days.
4. Comments that read like real viewers
The wording is generated to vary and to sound natural: a joke about the news, a portfolio split, a compliment. On its own, each comment looks like ordinary conversation. The pattern only shows across many comments and channels.
5. Accounts that are used once
Of the 620,000+ spam accounts RemoveSpam caught in the last year, 65% posted only once, and 84% of those with a known creation date were less than a week old. Filters that rely on an account’s history have nothing to go on.
What to do about it
Keep YouTube’s filters on: they remove a lot of junk for free. Add blocked words for the plain spellings you see, and hold comments with links for review. For the disguised, mutating scams, you need detection that normalises lookalike characters and tracks campaigns as they change, which is what RemoveSpam does, checking your newest video every minute.
Common questions
Is YouTube’s spam filter useless then?
No. It removes a large amount of obvious spam and costs nothing, so keep it on. It is built for spam in general, though, while scam comments are designed to get past general filters.
Why do scam comments sometimes disappear on their own later?
YouTube reviews some comments after they are posted and may remove them hours later. By then the comment has already been seen during the busiest hours of the video.
The scams behind this
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