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TOKYO (MacHouse) - We received a spam message more than 6 hours ago. It’s a very simple message. The title is hahaha see this video. (See Screenshot 01.) The message itself is best youtube video ;). Then there is a link. The domain is youtube-r.com. Ahh… It’s not exactly the YouTube website. At first, I thought I would be redirected to a computer-virus-distributing website of some sort by clicking on the link. Wait… Does this have to do with the recent outbreak of YouTube pharmacy spam accounts? As shown in Screenshot 02, career spammers have recently created several dozen YouTube accounts to forward Internet users to fake online pharmacy stores. Actually, that’s not the case. In fact, there is no underlying link behind the given one. So the link shown in the message is the exact destination. But if I click on the link, I get redirected to YouTube. Ohh… YouTube? Why?

Screenshot 01 - Source: MacHouse

Screenshot 02 - Source: YouTube

Screenshot 03 - Source: YouTube

Interestingly, no matter how many times you access http://youtube-r.com, you will get redirected to http://youtube.com/watch?v=IFX4zhNubBI&feature=related or equivalent, depending on the choice of your country. (See Screenshot 03.) The user account name is HilariousVideosLol. If you take a close look at Screenshot 03, you will find that this particular video has been watched more than 1.1 million times. Whoa… That’s quite impressive. But there is something fishy about this spam operation.

Let’s see. What are chances that somebody only wanted to share an interesting video with us? That’s not the exact intention of the spammer, right? If you access not just http://youtube-r.com/watch?v=soIppEXMzxs&feature=related but http://youtube-r.com, you will get redirected to a particular YouTube video. They could have simply pasted the link of http://youtube.com/watch?v=IFX4zhNubBI&feature=related, but they didn’t. Why?

Our guess is that this is an organized YouTube Partner Program scam operation. They want to send Internet users to particular YouTube accounts to earn ad money. Note that we have no information that the group behind the account of HilariousVideosLol joins YouTube Partner Program.

By the way, where is the website of youtube-r.com hosted? The IP location of the website is 211.95.79.57. So it’s possibly hosted in China.

We will have a more detailed report in several hours.






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MacHouse is not funded by tax payers' money. We have limited resources. We also need time to sleep and eat just as others. So we will not act as the International police to contact all victims of website abuse. All you have to do is to subscribe to spam messages and spam posts. If we can, why don't you?