YouTube Is Deleting My Channel

Hey guys,

So I apologize that this is not my usual video, but I wanted to bring something to everyone's attention because I have a feeling I'm not the only one dealing with this, and I want to bring awareness to some issues happening right now.

First of all, you might have noticed that throughout the last week, I have stopped responding to comments. This is because, for some reason, my account was shadow banned from showing up on videos. This meant that I could go and comment on other channels, but my comment was hidden, or it was only temporarily visible when you would sort by newest first. Now this has happened to me in the past, and sometimes I think, okay, maybe I've just been commenting too much. I've hit some sort of threshold, and it's just temporary. But this week, my comments were just straight up not showing up.

So the other morning, I logged into my account and I saw a big red banner at the very top of the page: "Our team has detected repeated or severe comment spam from your channel. Unless you immediately stop all spam activities, your channel will be terminated on July 12th." Prior to this, I've received no warnings or no indication that this was ever an issue. Not to mention, when I saw this, my heart sunk because I knew it had to be an error. The concept of my channel being possibly terminated due to something that I have no idea about is absolutely terrifying, especially when all of this just came out of the blue.

I also got this email from YouTube with a termination warning: "Comment spam detected. Hi Graham Stefan, we wanted to let you know that our team has detected repeated or severe comment spam from your account, which is a violation of our spam deceptive practices and scams policy. Any future violations of our comments spam policy will result in immediate termination of your channel."

So, of course, I wanted to learn more about what was going on and what was happening, so I clicked on the "learn more" button, but that left me even more confused. YouTube defines comment spam as comments where the sole purpose is to gather personal info from viewers, misleadingly drive viewers off YouTube, or perform any of the prohibited behaviors noted above. Okay, so that is something I have definitely never done before.

But then I scroll down a little bit more to this: "Repetitive comments leaving large amounts of identical, untargeted, or repetitive comments." This is the point where I'm thinking, okay, maybe it's just because I'm writing too many "enjoy" and "thanks for watching" replies to new comments on videos because I want to thank everybody for taking the time to click and watch the video. But none of that was untargeted. I'm not gathering any data from you. I'm not trying to get you off the platform. I'm just thanking you for watching and genuinely hoping you enjoy the video. Plus, I physically do all of that myself as often as I can, so that would be a crazy reason to ever terminate a channel.

So I had a feeling it was not that. But if we scroll down a little bit further, YouTube gives us examples of what the comment spam actually looks like. That includes comments and surveys or giveaways that promote pyramid schemes, pay-per-click referral links, and comments that falsely claim to offer full video content. Posting links to harmful software, phishing sites, and comments with links to counterfeit stores. Channel promotion when the channel has nothing to do with the video it was posted in and posting the same comment repeatedly with a link to your channel. And again, I've done none of this.

The fact that my channel was somehow targeted for deletion is a major oversight by YouTube. And if my channel gets terminated, I mean, this is literally my life. I've spent these last four and a half years obsessing over every video, trying to make them perfect, giving you the content that you want to see, trying to make it fun, and never missing an upload so you have a schedule that you could rely on.

Now, I did reach out to YouTube, who assured me that they were looking into this further and making sure the entire situation was resolved. But I have a feeling, a theory if you will, why this is going on and why my account was scheduled for deletion. About a year ago, I noticed a series of new accounts beginning to impersonate me in the comments section. They would use my same name, my same profile picture, and use bots to respond to every single comment on a video, sometimes multiple times, telling that person to text a WhatsApp number for investment advice.

Needless to say, the entire thing is a scam, and if you send them Bitcoin, they bring you to a fabricated landing page where they give you made-up profits, and then they pressure you to send them even more money until eventually they disappear. The problem with all of that is that these comments are impossible to delete. They always show up within seconds of me posting a new video, all pretending to be me or using a slight variation of my name with the exact same message.

I do my best to block those users, remove them from the channel, and delete those comments, but within a minute they've made a new account and bot reply hundreds of comments at a time. I even go so far as to block specific words that they use from showing up in my comments like "WhatsApp," but as you would expect, within about five minutes they realize that their comments are not showing up, so they use slight variations around the word to get past the spam filter.

The other issue with this is that it doesn't even matter if I delete the comments because, if you have email notifications turned on, you're going to immediately see an email saying that Graham Stefan has responded to you with the WhatsApp number that you could go and text. They've even taken this a step further and ran ads of me on my own videos known as the "Graham Stefan Arbitrage." It's not mine; it's a scam. And every single time I block that link from appearing on my channel, they go and change the link, and it shows up again.

This is not just happening to me, either. It's happening to everybody in the investing space. Meet Kevin gets the same comments as I do shortly after posting. Jeremy Financial Education gets them. Andre Jick gets them. My second channel gets them. My podcast gets them. Our live streams get them. Even my girlfriend now has people impersonating her, along with my assistant Jack.

Although it appears in the process of cracking down on this, my channel was accidentally swept into the big mess of trying to chip away at these spam comments. Even though I'm not exactly sure what's going on right now, I have a feeling that YouTube is identifying accounts that just post the same comments over and over again, prompting people to go and text a WhatsApp number, and when they all use my name as their username, it was inevitable that their policies would round up all the "Graham Stefans" out there, and my real account would somehow get mixed into that.

Again, all of that's just a total guess, but it would make some sense. Between the comments and the fake ads, I'm overwhelmed, and the best thing that I could do right now is draw attention to it and bring awareness so that no one else falls for these scams. In the meantime, I've been in communication with YouTube to make sure that my account is still here after July 12th because, like I said, most likely they're just mixing me in with all the other comment spam and all the other fake "Graham Stefans" trying to get you to text their number.

I also know I'm not the only one this is happening to, and I would hate for other legitimate channels to potentially get terminated by mistakenly being swept up under the same rug. But I can't say there's a part of me that's not worried about how they plan to address this going forward.

So my message to YouTube: Thank you so much for making sure this issue is addressed and doing your best to cut down on these comments. I want to keep my channel in good standing, and if there's anything that I could do on my end to help, I'm all for it. And to you watching, I just want to say I really appreciate your support and just know I will never ask you to send me cryptocurrency. I don't use WhatsApp. The only accounts that I have are verified, with the exception of Twitter. I don't know when that's going to happen, so unless you see a check mark next to my name, and that's my actual account that I use, it's not me.

In my opinion, probably the best solution to this would be to have an option that only allows seasoned accounts to comment, meaning that account has been set up and in good standing for a few months, they've verified an email address, and they have a valid phone number. From there, the creator would have the option to only allow comments from seasoned accounts, meaning that no new accounts are able to comment. Never send anyone money who says that they are me because I don't do that. And of course, if you see an ad with my face in it, just know that that ad is being used without my permission, and I am not associated with it at all.

So thank you so much for hearing me out, and if you have any thoughts on this or anything you want to share, just feel free to comment down below, and I will do my best to read as many comments as I can. At least through this, we could bring more attention to the issue, make sure fewer people fall for it, and the more people who know this exists, the more we could fight it together.

So with that said, guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it as always. I forgot to ask you to hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm, if you would not mind doing that. Great! Thank you so much. Make sure to subscribe because I post three videos every single week. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram; I post pretty much daily. So if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there as well.

On my second channel, "The Graham Stefan Show," I post there every single day I'm not posting here. So if you want to see a brand new video from me every single day, make sure to add yourself to that. Thank you so much for watching, and until next time!