The official Dota 2 YouTube channel of gaming giant Valve was recently compromised by scammers in order to promote a bogus Solana-based meme cryptocurrency called "dota2coin."
A screenshot shared by popular VR enthusiast and hardware analyst Brad Lynch shows a livestream announcing the official launch of the fraudulent token on the Pump.fun meme coin factory.
The hack has also been widely discussed on Reddit, with a warning about the scam tokens becoming one of the top posts over the past 24 hours.
"This guy is spreading lies so he can keep the coin all for himself!" one user quipped in response to the warning.
Coordinated attack?
Notably, the official YouTube channels of ESL (Electronic Sports League) and the BLAST Premier circuit (a tournament system focused on CS:GO) also got hacked around the same time.
Some users suspect that this was a coordinated and rather sophisticated attack.
Notably, this coincided with the video-hosting giant experiencing a massive outage earlier today. The Google-owned website was briefly unavailable across the globe.
Familiar pattern
Over the past few years, there have been several high-profile account takeovers by crypto scammers on YouTube.
For instance, the extremely popular tech-focused channel of Canadian YouTuber Linus Sebastian, who boasts millions of followers, was compromised by Bitcoin fraudsters back in 2023.
During the same year, the "DidYouKnowGaming" YouTube channel got hacked to promote an XRP scam.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team