Hackers Took Over My Google Account & YouTube Channel

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]So, it's time for coffee and to tell you about the Google hack and the YouTube channel takeover, takedown, and also the recovery of both accounts. So, I'm just waiting to go into work right now. I'm going to try to keep it concise. A couple of days ago, I think it was April 30th.

[00:00:22]I was meant to be starting a new job.

[00:00:23]This got held back a little bit. On that particular morning, a serious event took place in my life.

[00:00:32]One cup of coffee, and it it made me think about security in a very strong way.

[00:00:37]I was a victim of a phishing scam.

[00:00:40]Phishing scam means basically where hackers uh send out emails and they get access to your accounts if you click on any links. Now, I know there's going to be people that will say, "You're stupid.

[00:00:54]You shouldn't have done that." And I agree with you, but this was and I've I know about phishing scams and I have been aware of it, and I have had thousands and thousands and thousands of emails over the years. And I've never fallen victim to anything. But, this was highly sophisticated and it's the reason why I want to make this video is cuz I want to tell you about the sophistication and also about how to just protect yourself. I'm not an expert. I'm not telling you exactly what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm doing, and maybe it's something you could find useful because people have been in touch and have informed me about certain things that that uh that I'm going to be doing and I'm doing, and it may be helpful to you. I really feel for older people or people that are have impairments or anything like that, and that's not to be ageist or anything like that.

[00:01:44]Um it's just I feel like that if you're not up up to speed with technology, it is a very difficult time to be living because these attacks are going on all the time.

[00:01:54]What happened in my case is I have two emails. I have uh a personal, which is kind of a business email as well, but it's it's mainly meant to be personal.

[00:02:04]It's kind of a mix, which is my Google account. And I also have a business account, which is [email protected], which is not Google.

[00:02:11]And it is actually, to be honest with you, not great because it doesn't filter spam. It's called Titan. I get it through Hostinger, which is where I host all my stuff.

[00:02:23]And to be honest with you, it's not fantastic because there's a lot of spam emails coming in and they're not going into any spam folder, etc. And it is kind of a case where I'm seeing these emails more more than I am on Google.

[00:02:37]And it is Actually, on Google it's very good. People do tend to give out about Google and blame Google. Actually, it's not Google's fault what happened here.

[00:02:44]Actually, Google were fantastic when dealing with me. I'm not talking about other problems with Google. I'm talking about this specific problem. This was not Google's fault. You can go on about how Google is bad, etc. That's not what this video is about. This video is actually about me making a mistake and ultimately my account being taken over.

[00:03:05]But as well, of course, you know, this is it's not about victim blaming either. I'm not victim blaming myself. This was a coordinated attack, international attack by Russians or people based in Russia or people saying they're based in Russia.

[00:03:21]And this is a high-level scam because it was taking place in real time.

[00:03:26]On X, I could see there was huge amounts of activity in this regard. People were And the reason I say X is because YouTube help can be contacted through X.

[00:03:35]And I could see that other people, like with huge accounts, people with 80,000, over 100,000 being uh locked out of their accounts and channel terminated.

[00:03:45]It all happened in that morning. So, I had this email in my in my inbox and I've been kind of looking into it because I had actually a very cool offer about this online platform and AI online platform and the people say, "Oh, AI AI AI calm calm down." These I use AI tools that help me with my productivity and I don't care what anyone says, AI tools are amazing for productivity. That's just the reality of the world. Everybody was against social media at one point, now everybody's on social media.

[00:04:14]Eventually, everybody's going to be using AI like social media. It's just the way the world is going, unfortunately. Uh again, this is not what this video is about, but there was an AI platform that was was offering to cut long-form content down really really quickly. And this is actually a legit platform. I'm not going to name them because it's not their fault because it had nothing to do with them. The hackers had cloned this website, believe it or not. They had cloned this website, so it looked like the legitimate website.

[00:04:45]And I had actually already checked the email and the you know, the whole the whole system, the whole pipeline. I had checked it through ChatGPT and ChatGPT said it looks really legit, like it looks really legit. Cuz usually ChatGPT is quite good for spotting spam emails, etc. I know there's going to be people that are going to say, "Oh my god, you made this mistake." Yeah, you'd fair enough. If you want to go down that road in the comment section, you can do it, but like at the end of the day, I'm a human being.

[00:05:16]Never been hacked, never been scammed like this before. It happened once in my entire life. It It's happened to many people.

[00:05:22]So, eventually, I did click on the link and I got to a place where there was a Google sign-in. This is where the big mistake was. This thing looked completely legitimate, like a Google sign-in, but actually, I am completely traumatized. I will never sign in with Google anymore on anything because it's just it I will never do it again.

[00:05:43]Um because I just won't and I will always sign in with my multi-factor authentication um in future. Never again will I do it because and I would actually say to you just just be very careful when you're signing into something and using Google sign-in. This is where it all went wrong.

[00:05:59]But there was this there's a tactic where they basically start taking away your multi-factor authentication. Right? They start taking away your recovery email all they start changing everything. But you still have power, but the problem is this happens so quickly that you panic and you forget that this is the the hacker is literally doing this in real time after you try to sign into this platform.

[00:06:26]And then cuz what the platform was offering me was offering me a partnership with this platform to use and to maybe you know talk about it on videos and stuff and stuff.

[00:06:36]Uh too good to be true? Yes, probably.

[00:06:38]So then they started taking away all this stuff.

[00:06:42]I still had power, but I panicked because I thought it was something to do with the actual platform I was signing into. So there was a button pressed at one point and that was when boom, I was locked out. They had locked me out. And within an hour they were on my YouTube channel and they had a live stream going on up there. But thankfully within another hour the channel was terminated for breaking community guidelines and so so the YouTube channel was gone.

[00:07:10]The hackers thankfully because I had I was panicking the entire day. I was like panicking because I didn't realize that uh it wasn't an individual thing.

[00:07:19]It was actually an international global thing that was happening. So it wasn't really an individual attack. It was more of a automated kind of like attack across the board trying to get these Bitcoin live streams out there. And it didn't really have much interest in my personal data thankfully. Now I did try they did try to do some payments from my Stripe account etc. but it was so scammy and and spammy that Stripe automatically logged it as as as a you know, not me. Because I immediately once this happened, I canceled all my cards. And I, you know, this was while I was being I was being locked out of my system. So, what happened when trying to get back into it? So, it took me the entire day to find it took me almost 12 to 14 hours to find an email.

[00:08:06]And I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit because I was just so panicked during that day. I was putting out videos. Thankfully, I wasn't locked out of my social media, other social media.

[00:08:16]And so, I had access to social media where I could put out the word.

[00:08:20]Eventually, I got onto X, got onto them. YouTube help. And then I found in the YouTube community and Google community, I had to search for ways to to contact Google and YouTube.

[00:08:33]And I found these forms and I filled out these forms. And the next morning, I and I filled out the forms as best like with loads of information, with loads of evidence. So, I I screenshotted everything as this was happening. Cuz you could see in my recovery email on Google that what was happening, my stuff was being taken off. So, I had evidence, right? So, I had it I had evidence. I knew I knew my channel. So, I was able to give my last video, my channel ID. I knew I knew everything about my account.

[00:09:03]So, then, in the end, they got back to me the next morning.

[00:09:09]And within within a less than a 26-hour period, I was No.

[00:09:16]Yeah, around a 36-hour period, I was back into my Google account. And my channel was restored pretty soon after that. Maybe it was the next day. And I'm going to be honest, YouTube support and Google support were amazing. I don't care what anyone says.

[00:09:32]They were incredible. They were so nice.

[00:09:34]And I actually got replied to across the board. The legal team, the Google Pay, the YouTube support, Google support, everybody got back to me. I thought they were amazing. I really did. But, it's made me think that about security. I have everything changed, passwords, multi I have vast amount of multi factor authentication like near all of them across the board. I'm getting a Ubi Ubico key, a hardware security key. This is a very very important thing to have for anybody that's very serious about security is a a hardware security key. They don't even sell these in PC stores. These are something you have to buy online. I'm not a sponsor of I'm not sponsored or anything like that. I'm not trying to sell these things at all. But, I am I am getting that and I'm it's going to be an extra layer of security.

[00:10:23]Uh I'm taking other precautions as well, you know, across all my other platforms and changed all the passwords and added new security. I have a password manager.

[00:10:34]The good thing is that I did have a level of security in place as well.

[00:10:38]But, in the interim, I had a almost like a panic attack. One of the days I finished my first shift and I noticed that there was an a suspicious activity on my Google account. There was some hacker trying to change my Google authentication.

[00:10:53]And then it was stopped and my Google my Google account was locked. So, I had to recover it and I think that's probably like a residue of what happened before.

[00:11:02]And I looked into this and it seems like there's some high level high level hacking going on through cookies, through all sorts of different things.

[00:11:11]But, the reality is now that I've taken these steps, it's going to be very hard for hackers to get in again unless I do the same mistakes again. So, I hope anyway that's the case. Now, I don't want to go on and on and on and on about this, but that's essentially what happened. It was a very traumatic event.

[00:11:26]It felt like someone broke into my house and was take had taken over my house.

[00:11:31]You know, the vast amount of information that I had, I'm taking necessary steps as well to protect my information.

[00:11:37]There's a bunch of other things that I'm going to be doing. I'm going to go sign up to another VPNs um uh VPN uh company as well soon enough.

[00:11:45]So, look, that is it. That is the reality of what happened. Thank you so much for anybody that supported me across the board. There is still problems with my YouTube channel. It's not getting the views that it did before. So, I would appreciate if you watched a couple of videos and left left a few comments. There are ways to support. I'm going to leave it in the pinned comment if you want to support donate towards the mission. If you want to buy a book, The Forgotten Prince is actually on sale at the moment. There's a lot of sales right now. And there's just other ways to support my all my websites. Everything will be back up and running properly very soon. So, thank you so much. Go with me to go learn my culture. Be made of kindness. Slongofall.