YouTube's First Scam

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In the summer of 2010, thousands of users across YouTube received a very strange private message in their inbox, telling them to visit earnsubscribers(dot)com, a website that guaranteed overnight success for aspiring YouTubers. Of course, the site ended up being a total sham, but at the expense of many gullible users that ended up losing a lot along the way.

Every great innovation in technology, whether for better or for worse, starts somewhere remarkably simple. The very first motion picture to be seen in theaters was of a moving train, and the very first website was nothing more than text on a screen. These were just two out of many breakthroughs in technology that blew away the people of their time, to the point where you and I can sit down and still talk about them today. It didn’t take much complexity for them to change the world in their respective fields, because there was nothing else like it before. And of course, the same applies to online scams. During a time where people didn’t truly realize what the internet was capable of, it didn’t exactly take a lot of effort for malicious developers to get the high turnover of gullible people that they desired. May 5, 2000, was the turning point for computer viruses when something as simple as commands in a notepad file could cause billions of dollars in devastating destruction and put previous viruses to shame.

These stories almost act as folklore that we can pass down from generation to generation, but that’s not always the case. Some significant events in history are lost to time, and for the turning point in social media scams, that was April 30, 2010, when thousands of users across YouTube received a very strange private message in their inbox. The message was very cordial, praising the user for their high-quality videos. “You’re incredibly underrated. You deserve more recognition, and you can get that by simply going to Earnsubscribers(dot)com.” Wow! Was it really that easy? Could I become the next Fred, or RayWilliamJohnson? Or maybe, just maybe…was it all too good for be true?

People saw all the smoke and mirrors rather quickly, but that did not stop the messages from continuing to get around and lure in the uninformed. The only option left was to combat that and spread the word about the website’s illegitimacy, and now dozens of creators were making videos telling their community to beware. All of this was a byproduct of a scam that was so basic in its functionality, the people of today could see it coming from a mile away. But Earnsubscribers(dot)com was a product of its time, and for that, it was able to catch thousands of people in its trap, but how? What did this simple, yet ingenious website do to earn its 15 minutes of fame on one of the biggest websites in the world?

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