Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sues YouTube more than bitcoin scams working with his image
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is launching a legal attack against Google’s YouTube video web page for allowing people to use him as a pawn in a good Bitcoin scam believed to have heisted huge amount of money from people around the world.
The non-public computer pioneer vented his frustration and anger in a video conference held Thursday to clarify why he made a decision to sue among the world’s biggest internet companies in a California state court earlier this week. The suit as well symbolizes 17 alleged victims of the bitcoin scam, incorporating 10 people who live beyond your U.S.
The 47-page complaint revolves around a ruse that has used images of Wozniak and high-tech celebrities such as Microsoft co-founder Costs Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to trick people out of the digital currency Bitcoin. Videos spread on YouTube within the scheme entice viewers to give their bitcoins to an anonymous digital address, promising to return double that amount. The return repayment never arrives.
It’s similar to a scam that surfaced on Twitter the other day when hackers hijacked the accounts of more than 100 prominent persons, including Gates, Musk, former President Barack Obama and Joe Biden, this year’s Democratic Party nominee for president. Twitter could regain control of the hacked accounts and purge the scam from its messaging service within a couple of hours.
Wozniak, though, said he has been looking to get Google and YouTube to prevent videos peddling the scam along with his brand and picture found in it since May 10. But the blog can’t seem to avoid the blatant ruse from repeatedly reappearing on the website after a bogus clip is removed, he said.
“It’s like Whack-A-Mole,” Wozniak said. “You can't ever reach a human being who easily understand the situation and obtain it rectified by some technique. Anybody would search at that and say it’s a crime. We never got to a individual. Maybe I could pull some strings, but I don’t have confidence in pulling strings.”
Both Wozniak and one of is own lawyers, Joseph Cotchett, urged U.S. lawmakers to confront Google CEO Sundar Pichai about why YouTube hasn’t performed more to stop fraudulent activity on his blog when he testifies before Congress in a hearing scheduled for Monday, July 27.
YouTube said it removed 2.2 million videos and terminated 1.7 million accounts through the 1st three months of the year for violating its guidelines against deceptive practices. Nonetheless it had no comment about Wozniak’s specific charges.
“We take abuse of our system seriously, and do something quickly when we find violations of our guidelines,” YouTube explained in a Thursday statement.
A good former Yahoo executive who now operates a digital currency firm, Brad Garlinghouse, filed a federal lawsuit against YouTube and Google in April alleging much the same misconduct that Wozniak cited in his complaint.
Both lawsuits allege that YouTube allows scams to seem on its site for the reason that viewers they attract help sell the site’s digital ads, which overall made $15 billion in revenue for Google last year.
Although Google’s internet search engine serves as the company’s virtually all lucrative advertising channel, YouTube has been playing an extremely important role in the past few years as persons watch even more video online rather than traditional TV.
In a reply to Garlinghouse’s lawsuit on Monday, YouTube explained it can't be held liable for the rip-off video under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 24-year-old legislation that defends internet companies from being held in charge of material posted by third parties as long as they promptly remove against the law content . YouTube will try to persuade a judge to dismiss Garlinghouse’s lawsuit throughout a hearing scheduled next month.
