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Tricked into deleting my channel.... how? (Patreon)

Published:
2021-07-30 12:49:48
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

This is an early view of the video I'll release on 1st August. It explains why my channel was off-air for days at the end of July 2021.

It wasn't exactly my finest hour, but it does go to prove that anyone can be scammed if the circumstances are exactly right. There were a few unfortunate incidents just prior to this phishing email and I explain exactly what happened in the video

Thank you so much for your continued support through all of this.

If the link above doesn't work, try: https://youtu.be/OfnPJA0u2RY

Thank you for helping me though a very traumatic week.

Jim

Files

Previews only

ChannelDeleted PatronVersion

This is the story behind why this channel went dark at the end of July 2021. Was I hacked? What led up to the deletion of the channel? Thank you again for your continued support, particularly over the period where I seemed to go off the air. Without your support, I would have had great difficulty getting everything back together. Hopefully this will explain what happened...

Comments

Nolan Collins

At least you got your channel back

Burt Bag

Thanks for everything you do for the masses. Maybe burning the candle at both ends caught up with you. Least we've all learnt something from this. Chin up mate you've done so much good and helped many vulnerable people.

Anonymous

Jim, you are a brilliant mind that has helped so many and even though this must have been hell for you, your honesty will continue to help so many others come forward to shed light on what these crooks are up to. Forever impressed by you, sorry for the rough week, and so glad to see you back!

J D

Sweet so u worked it out? Jim jim jim send that 100 dollars for the 1 million waiting for u lol

Pat Fox

Jim, I wonder if you intended to leave your fastmail email address visible? Not sure if it's important.

Sarah Johnson

Best news ever! So glad it's back! Internet superhero is back in full swing! 💝💝🌷🌷

Ivan Hartley

So glad to hear you got it sorted mate, and full credit to you for admitting and sharing your mistake, it takes a big man to admit when he makes a mistakes 👍 Keep up the good work

Ross Wilson

Good to have you back, Jim.

Rich ODrobinak

This is very scary! Scammers are becoming more sophisticated. I'm very sorry this happened to you, however, this is a great opportunity to have others be more vigilant. This also shows that the best can even be scammed. Thank you so much for sharing this experience.

Debbie Brown

Jim, I went and checked by clicking on your channel icon instead of typing in the header. It shows that I am subscribed I do get notifications and of course my patreon link to you is still there. When I saw that your channel had been compromised I went and doubled my monthly donation through patreon and I will not change that because you have shown all of us your true humility and also your willingness to declare your mistake too so that we don't do the same. As I said in Prior comments while you were offline oh, you don't take our Batman down without repercussions! I hope this scammer who got to you temporarily suffers online repercussions permanently by becoming offline. Thanks again for sharing with us what happened to you and just know that more than three million people were horrified and worried sick about you for the last 4 days. Welcome back and thank you for continuing to do what it is that you do. We love you man we really do!

Dave Stowell

im soooooooo, so glad you got to keep the channel. That must have been an agonising 5 days. EDIT, just an FYI, i didn't have to resubscribe and your channel pops up first in a search of your name too.

Lucy Wolski

This was fascinating! It sparked some conversations in my house with my kids about scams. It made me remember that my son and I fell for a Roblox scam, and my son lost his account. I was trying to help him and I ended up giving the login info to someone else. It was my fault, of course, I'm the adult and it seemed legit to me. We weren't able to recover the lost account. It was a scary feeling for me, realizing I was out of my depth (I don't play Roblox), and that I've lost something.

Anonymous

So glad it turned out all right. Good for you. This is a good lesson for all of us.

Dave Stowell
>>64756278

i noticed that too, i figured he left it up as he'd changed it now. but now everything's been recovered im not so sure.

A Hoel

What a terrifying experience, but you got your channel back! Not everyone is lucky enough to get back what has been stolen from them :/ Hope they find the little shit who did this.

Anonymous

Wonderful!! Welcome back!!

dannydaw59

You fell off the horse because someone else knocked you off but you got right back on and chased them instead of giving up. Great job and after seeing this Patreon video I went to my YouTube and checked if I was still subscribed and I was. It was like your account theft never happened.

Anonymous

Unbelievable!! damn, now we have a generation of properly skilled scammers. I am glad you recovered everything.

JimBrowning
>>64756713

Fundamentally, this was my fault. Yes, there was a phishing attempt, but I should have been taking much more care than this. It's my own mess really and I appreciate your support and the support I've received from YouTube.

Anonymous

Good to have you back Jim!

Stephen Brown

Well done Jim great that you have had your account recovered.

Elaine

Yayyy! Really delighted you have recovered the situation and appreciate all the good advice you gave at the end of the video if we suspect any untoward behaviour/emails, particularly the one about taking your time to verify what's happening. In the great words of Corporal Jones, "Don't panic, don't panic!!"

UnsubtleHedge

Glad to hear 99.9% of your channel has been restored. 2FA/2SA is super important for security; I started using it wherever I can. Thanks for opening up about this; it will help those who haven't spoken out about this yet.

Stephanie Humphries

Jim first and foremost I'm so glad you got your channel back. All the scanners did was awaken a sleeping bear lol because I know you are going to come back stronger than ever before. I am so glad to be a patreon of yours and when I am back to my normal job I will definitely up my patreon. Good luck to you in future of fighting these scammers 💪 💖

Anonymous

Wow. You never called a human to verify? You didn’t contact Adsense? How could you fall for this? Anytime I get an email that looks real from eBay or a credit card, I ignore the email and call a human being.

Phil Schroeder

Happy endings, Jim. There’s something ironic that the scammer doesn’t appear to be connected with the guys you’ve been working so hard to expose. I think many of us thought this was a concerted effort at payback but it’s clear those bozos are both too dumb and too lazy to do what this guy did. It’s a pretty good scam! I suppose the danger in exposing this is in giving Indian scammers a new tool, but so be it. As a Google user myself, it’s so discouraging dealing with the very impersonal and heavily scripted support. Glad you got through to someone.

Anonymous

Making a mistake, taking responsibility and help others to not fall for it Hat off, you have all my respect sir

Eric Oaks

Props to this guy for having major balls, or unbeliveable stupidity, or both, for trying to recruit someone who has "tech support scams forbidden" as his damn Youtube avatar!

Peskeh

Love you Jim! From what I've seen you're not the only YouTuber that has fallen for this particular scam, though hopefully others who have deleted their channels are also able to recover their content.

5

Welcome back and I hope they do take down the scammer. In most Islamic countries theft is taken very seriously. This is a case of theft if I have ever seen one. I wouldnt want to be him.

Adrienn Richmond

Cover up your email address in the video or you will get lots of further spam.

Krishna Ramaraju

It would be interesting to know how successful this scam is. I initially assumed it was some kind of "revenge" attack from Indian scammers just to aggravate you. I have never even heard of this or seen a YouTube channel disappear so I wonder just how successful this kind of scam is. It's also odd for this to have come from a Syrian (there are literally millions of them in Turkey) in an area that gets a lot of money from vacationing Europeans. Something still seems a bit odd here.

Anonymous

Glad to see you back!

Paula Hernandez

It's always been my policy to sign Into the 'front door', as I call it, for any random contact about my accounts. I don't follow any links or phone numbers, I sign into the main site, from another window and can easily see any alerts or messages that should be there, if it was necessary to reach out to me. I am NOT a tech person, by any means but try to protect myself. I was wondering if that, in any way, would have stopped this scam sooner?

Suitboyapps

WOOHOO! So glad you're back :)

PapiKink

You’re back! 👏🏽 Awesomeness. Excellent work in dissecting the scam and even getting the scammer to chat it up with you. Great work.

PapiKink

Soooo….the Jim Browning channel with the grandkids and older gentleman as the avatar picture…that’s someone else, right, not you?

Elaine

Have all your comments been restored? I know that your wry comment on one of Kitboga's videos used to be the first listed, but it's no longer there.

Anonymous

Much love jim. Sorry that happened to you man

Anonymous

Hey Jim, I wanted to provide some clarity, to yourself and everyone, on why you saw the email from @google dot com. First and foremost the scammer definitely did not spoof the @google dot com domain, effectively what had happened was that the scammer sent you a message on Google Chats, and Google Chats sent you an email pretty much saying "hey this person messaged you on google chats, we don't want you to miss the message". This is why the senders name had (Via Google Chats) and why those links are legitimate, and the spelling was mostly correct, other than the actual content of the message sent by the scammer. Also, why the email header checked out. I can assure you that there would be NO WAY of spoofing the actual google dot com domain due to various anti-spoofing security features setup, mostly made up of what are called SPF, DKIM, and most importantly DMARC DNS records. These records all verify the sending domain, reply-to addresses, the email servers/ip addresses the emails are from, etc and the most important one, DMARC verified that both SPF an DKIM records have "passed" in order to not deliver the email to either the spam folder, or outright rejecting it. While the records aren't a bullet proof way of stopping spoofing, but it makes it so difficult that it's not even worth trying to spoof with DMARC setup, especially if its setup correctly. You definitely were on the right track of checking the email header to verify where it came from, and if it was legitimate. However, in this case it would have checked out as legitimate, as it did, due to actually coming from Googles email servers, and from a legitimate account. I just wanted to provide some of my knowledge on this, as I deal with this on a constant basis trying to lock down the security of new clients and existing clients with my companies new cybersecurity program. I highly recommend reading up on this, as for the most part, SPF and DMARC can be looked up publicly, while DKIM required the knowledge of the selector in order to check it. I can say that the use of the Google Chat notification email was probably not intentional, but aided the scammer in trying to prove legitimacy. You can check for yourself the records setup by google by going to mxtoolbox dot com and using the supertool to check for those records. You can also see that google is already setup to "reject" messages that do not pass the DMARC policy, meaning the emails don't even get delivered to the recipients mailbox, they're just thrown right out as it passes through Gmail servers.

Anonymous

THE GOD IS BACK!!!!!!!!!!

Brian Morrow

Very happy to see everything worked out.

Alice Murray

Thank goodness Google was able to resolve the issue. I, too, was the victim of a scam to my surprise, and it was due to a coincidence. I had just called Windows Tech Support with a problem I was having on my PC, and an agent said he would get back to me. The scam took place a few hours later. Because I caught on to the scam toward the end, the scammer wiped my PC drives clean. Not only did I lose photos of my precious grandchildren, 10 years of my fiction writing was gone; 2 complete novels and the outline and notes for a third. I was devastated. I took the PC to my local Geek Squad as well as a reputable electronics shop, but nothing could be done. Luckily, I had downloaded much of my work onto a CD. As well, I had printed out one of my manuscripts. Still, it took me another 4 years to transcribe, rewrite, and salvage my work. Sadly, the family photos are gone forever, along with several pieces of original artwork. I felt so foolish, and because I am elderly, I was sure that I must be experiencing a decline in my cognitive abilities. That was, until I found your You Tube channel. And, of course, the horrible experience you had this month is further proof that, if not extremely careful, ANYONE can become the victim of a scam.

Alice Murray
>>64761530

"the scammer doesn’t appear to be connected with the guys you’ve been working so hard to expose"....I suspected the same. I imagined champagne flowing at call centers throughout India.

Randy Kovach

Thank you so much for sharing your story, it really underlines the importance of 2FA (which I use everywhere it's available) and paying attention at all times. Scammers are getting better and better at deceiving us. If it can happy to you, it can certainly happen to us mere mortals! So happy you were able to recover the channel!

Lorna Mangan

Very glad you’re back in business. There’s a spelling mistake on your last screen though, it says trough instead of through. Only mentioning because you make a thing about looking for spelling mistakes in the video- might want to fix before you release it.

Anonymous

Good to have you back!

PAT

Thank goodness you’re back!!

Leighton Petty

Overjoyed that everything worked out alright

Anonymous

I once almost fell for one of these scams. I drew the line at logging into my bank account. My wife received a social security scam call around two weeks ago. They told her she was going to jail as she was driving. She laughed at them as she hung up. I see stuff in one of my emails all the time. It’s very funny because it is the same email I use for other none person things. I have one email for my Bills, personal email, Veterans Administration… Another one for games and other stuff. Thanks Jim for doing what you do and for sharing your experience with us!

Anonymous

A similar scam is going on that looks very authentic & the Scammer is doing a very good job at appearing to be legitimate for Customers with Coinbase Accounts. It's almost to the point that you can't trust anyone anymore. Happy you resolved your issue Jim & welcome back!

Anonymous

Thank you for sharing Jim

Jeff Estoll

Glad things worked out. I did not have to resubscribe.

Ivko Cvejic

Excellent video as per usual.

Syd

Coincidence, distraction and tiredness favours the scammer!

Anonymous

Glad you managed to get the channel back Jim, just shows how convincing some people can be

Anonymous

Glad you have got it sorted mate. I joined Patreon so you can continue your good work.

Nik Thompson

Glad you got it figured out. It has been cool seeing how many unrelated channels have shown love. Pretty heart warming imo.

Steve Jones

Wow.. what a story.. As a datapoint - I just did the same google search from the end of the video, and it took me to your correct channel, and I was still subscribed. Just for good measure, I unsubscribed and re-subscribed, but it shows 3.35M subs..

Ben

Sooo glad that your channel could be restored! Pierogi is my second favorite scam baiter!

Anonymous

I’m glad you managed to get things sorted. I’m always happy to support people like you that are raising awareness off things like this and helping people by giving them advice on preventing being scammed.

Anonymous

Looking forward to learning how they scammed the best. Needless to say I'm sure you've learned a few things that will help you become a better boogeyman!

Anonymous

These crooks have all the time in the world to scheme how to cheat unsuspecting people who are going about doing their own thing to earn an honest living unlike these bandits who are living off honest people. Seeing uppercase or capital letters used in unusual ways should be a clue that some thing is amiss. Ever considered starting online training classes for a fee to build a Citizen force to fight these ever growing scammers? I guess we need to learn to create a virtual computer, coding etc... I for one am willing to learn.

Anonymous

When are you going to expose the Indian call centers?

Joel Nathan Joedeman

I agree with you sir. I fell for a scam recently too and they actually got money out of me. I am an IT Manager. I have a Master's Degree in Information systems, a bachelors in Networking and information security, and bachelors in general programming. I have a Net+ and Sec+ certification from CompTIA. Along with this, I have over 10 years experience in IT. Even with all these credentials and dealing with scams like this on a daily, I still fell for a scam. It was on facebook marketplace. I was trying to buy a PS VR set. I found one being sold by a lady in New York for about $140. Her profile looked real. It had been around for a long time, it had pictures on it, posts, and even had some reviews from previous sales on Facebook Marketplace. All in all, the profile didn't throw any of the usual red flags. I was communicating with her about the item, her english was good as well. Long story short, when the time came to pay she requested that I pay through facebook pay and not the marketplace because she needs the money first to send it. Considering it seemed like she was a single mom in need of money this didn't seem like an unfair request. That being said, in my defense it did throw all the usual red flags. In fact the IT part of my brain was BLARING sirens not to follow through with this. However, the human side of my brain really wanted this VR set and thought this could help her, so I went ahead and sent it in facebook pay. After that she thanked me, actually marked the item on Marketplace as PAID and told me she would send me tracking info when she gets it sent off. In the end it seemed like it was all good. That is until after a week, I tried to contact her and find out where my tracking was. Only to find out her profile was gone and I couldn't respond to any of our messages between us. All in all I am out $145, I don't have my VR headset. I should have listened to my red flags.

Anonymous

Could not facebook launch a n investigation to track this criminal? Did you complain?

Anonymous

Oh no this is awful. How did they take down the King of biters? Thank god you're back up and running

Anonymous

Geesh. It's amazing what people will do for just a tiny amount of money. It's ridiculous. I'm glad everything was recovered, and all is ok now. It's SO scary how easily that happened!