In response, the company argues that YouTube is not liable for scammers using YouTube’s platform, and Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. The Section 230 offers specific protections to sites that feature content created by users, for instance, YouTube cannot be treated as the publisher of the content posted by YouTubers, and hence, it is not liable for it. The company added that YouTube did not actively take part in those XRP scams, and the platform claims that it even removed fraudulent videos that were brought under the video-sharing platform’s attention.
Ripple’s lawsuit alleged that XRP scammers posting videos on YouTube have defrauded ‘millions of XRP valued at several thousands of dollars’ from victims. The crypto firm cited at least one incident where a scammer seemingly received XRP coins valued at nearly fifteen thousand dollars from a victim.
Those scams tricked users into sending their cryptocurrency, believing that they would get more crypto in return after some time. These types of cryptocurrency giveaway scams have been pretty common during the last few years, tricking thousands of individuals into sending their crypto in order to receive a larger amount of cryptocurrency after some time. Obviously, the sender does not receive any amount in return. Platforms including YouTube, Twitter, and Medium have been used to promote these types of scams. YouTube’s motion will continue on August 27 of this year, as per Court Listener.
In the case of Twitter, it was plagued with fake bot profiles that attract users to the scam, and the scammers went as far as to the massive Twitter hack in which high-profile accounts were hijacked. Scammers posted scams from these high-profile hijacked accounts.
It appears that this legal battle for YouTube is only a beginning as Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder has also announced that he is suing the platform and YouTube’s parent company, Google, for allowing scammers to use Wozniak’s name in Bitcoin scams.
Wozniak along with other seventeen plaintiffs claim that the Google-owned video-sharing platform is aware of these scams, however, it did nothing to remove those videos scamming people.
