Types of YouTube spam
Why blocking YouTube spam accounts doesn’t work
Hiding or banning a spam account stops that account, but most spam accounts were never going to post again anyway. Of the 620,000+ spam accounts RemoveSpam caught over the last year, 65% posted exactly once, and 99% posted five times or fewer. The accounts are disposable; the patterns they use are not.
By Dan, founder of RemoveSpam · Updated
- of spam accounts posted only once
- 65%
- posted five spam comments or fewer
- 99%
- of spam accounts with a known age were under a week old, against about 1% of genuine commenters
- 84%
Source: RemoveSpam removal data, October 2025 to November 2026, from YouTube channels protected by RemoveSpam (mostly crypto, finance and tech).
Spam accounts are disposable
Creating a YouTube account costs a spammer almost nothing, so campaigns use each one briefly and move on. Across more than 620,000 spam accounts in RemoveSpam’s data, two thirds posted a single comment. Only a few hundred posted more than 20. The most active account RemoveSpam saw posted 390 spam comments across 15 channels, and it is a rare exception.
The accounts are also new. In a sample of about 2,700 spam accounts whose creation date was known, 84% were less than a week old when they posted. Among genuine commenters it was about 1%.
What this means for hiding and banning users
YouTube’s “Hide user from channel” is still worth using, but it removes an account that, two times out of three, was finished anyway. Moderating account by account means doing the same work over and over against an endless supply of new accounts.
What stays the same across thousands of throwaway accounts is the content: the coin names and how they mutate, the scripts, the lookalike characters, the timing. RemoveSpam matches comments against a database of those patterns, updated daily, so a brand-new account posting a known scam is removed on its first comment.
Signs a commenter is a throwaway account
- A channel created in the last few days, with no uploads or playlists
- A generic or random-looking name, often with a string of characters at the end
- No other comments on your channel before this one
- A comment that mentions a coin, an advisor or a contact method
How RemoveSpam handles this: Repeat-offender and bot-flood handling.
Common questions
Does hiding a user on YouTube stop spam?
It stops that account’s comments from being shown, which helps against the few accounts that return. But in RemoveSpam’s data 65% of spam accounts post only once, so hiding users cannot keep up on its own. Filtering by content, not by account, is what scales.
Why are spam accounts so new?
Because they are cheap to create and are thrown away quickly. Over 84% of spam accounts with a known creation date were under a week old when they posted, compared with about 1% of genuine commenters.
Other types of YouTube spam
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