In an extended wave of cyber-attacks, the famous YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia’s YouTube channel Beer Biceps, along with his personal channel, got hacked and lost all video content on September 25, Wednesday night. Hackers changed the name of his podcast channel and renamed it to “Tesla”. Additionally, they modified the handle to “@Elon.trump.tesla_live2024.” Furthermore, his private channel was renamed to “@Tesla.event.trump_2024.” Everything he posted, including his recent interviews, was removed.
Not even a week has passed since recordings from the Supreme Court of India’s prior proceedings were removed from its YouTube channel after being hacked. In the past, YouTube was sued by the cryptocurrency company Ripple Labs for failing to take action against hackers posing as the company’s CEO, Bradley Kent Garlinghouse.
The hackers replaced all of Allahbadia’s podcasts and interviews with older recordings of Elon Musk and Donald Trump being interviewed. In the video, an AI-generated Elon Musk was seen endorsing cryptocurrency fraud. Musk was seen calling people to invest in cryptocurrency on a suspicious website, elonweb.net. The investor can obtain double returns by doing this. This scam is called “Bitcoin doubling,” which is common among hackers who go after well-known YouTubers. Currently, both usernames redirect to a “404 not found” page, with a message stating, “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else.”
Allahbadia, who was later revealed to be in Mumbai after first confirmed to be in Singapore, has not yet released a formal remark regarding the hack. He did, however, make a vague reference to the matter on Instagram by posting a picture of a meal and writing, “Celebrating my two main channels being hacked with my favourite food. Vegan burgers. Death of BeerBiceps met with Death of diet.” He shared a selfie wearing an eye mask in another story, humorously asking, “Is this the end of my YouTube career? Was nice knowing you all.” The third Instagram story said: “No jokes, no PR. Working on next steps. Just feeling calm right now. Life always shows you the next doorway.”
