A kind of similar thing happened with game key scammers. People will email the devs of hundreds of Steam games pretending to be a popular YouTuber, asking for keys for themselves and usually a few extra "for a giveaway". If they get the keys, they'll try to resell them for a profit.
At first you'd get emails from like, pewdiepie@outlook.com instead of pewdiepie@gmail.com. But you could usually check the YouTube about page to find the real business email and compare it.
So eventually the scammers started creating their own YouTube channels. They'd steal videos from other channels and reupload them, then get bots to add views and subscribers. Now the email matches the one on their channel.
One remaining tell tended to be the lack of comments, but it's been a few years since I had a game that was getting those kind of emails, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have good fake video comments these days too.
Here are a couple of examples of fake channels I have saved from a few years ago:
How do you know those two channels are "fake" or "scammers"?
I think I have a good eye for these things and worryingly they just look like the normal low effort youtube chaff but I wouldn't have thought fake/scamming.
Some common indicators (though this may have changed - I can only speak for ~7 years ago):
- Weird view counts. Strangely consistent, random sudden dropoff to near zero views, etc.
- No voice commentary. Can't steal videos from different channels if your "voice" changes I guess.
- A whole set of videos uploaded at once. This was more obvious when the linked channels were still active since you'd see like two rows of "2 days ago", then a bunch "1 week ago", then a bunch "3 weeks ago" etc.
- Social media etc links either missing or super basic.
- Few and generic comments vs. amount of views.
- Channel description generic, sometimes copied from other channels.
- The two I linked haven't done it, but some I saw were uploading long-plays of games split into many parts, I guess to easily pad out their total number of videos.
Another thing they were doing at the time, was changing their channel name and banner after a few weeks or months and then emailing again pretending to be a whole new channel. Easy to spot if you still had the old link and it was the same.
The second one I linked also mysteriously turns Russian if you scroll back far enough. Bit unusual for someone with their location listed as USA.
At first you'd get emails from like, pewdiepie@outlook.com instead of pewdiepie@gmail.com. But you could usually check the YouTube about page to find the real business email and compare it.
So eventually the scammers started creating their own YouTube channels. They'd steal videos from other channels and reupload them, then get bots to add views and subscribers. Now the email matches the one on their channel.
One remaining tell tended to be the lack of comments, but it's been a few years since I had a game that was getting those kind of emails, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have good fake video comments these days too.
Here are a couple of examples of fake channels I have saved from a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzOhUFVqJSGk20eB0kFCyOg
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_TgLJm0paPjmJQTWaHqDhQ