Fake vita hacks: Let’s play the debunk game

Update: wow, that was fast, less than one hour after my post, the video was removed from youtube, thanks a lot guys!

Many people claim to have vita hacks on youtube, and the pattern is always the same: these people steal somebody’s video (typically, a VHBL video), claim they have a working jailbreak/CFW for the Vita, and give you a mediafire link.

The archive is usually protected by a password, which you can obtain by answering a survey. Once you answer the survey, most likely you won’t get the password. If you do chances are it won’t work on the archive, and if it does, the archive contains a bunch of useless files: sometimes it’s a PSP firmware, sometimes a random dump of prx files, sometimes it’s simply VHBL files (that you can get for free here!). If you’re unlucky, the files contain a virus. Either way, you wasted time, and the scammer got paid some money from the surveys.

Usually I don’t pay attention to these scammers, even though I really don’t like how they steal my videos and pretend to be me, but today I’m feeling playful, so I want to debunk one such random video (thanks to John who sent me that link)

We have here somebody who copy/pasted Davee’s proof of concept for a HEN on the vita (see here), and pretends to have a CFW, yadda, yadda. I tried, don’t bother, it’s one of those scams I described above. So let’s play the debunk game. It’s easy at the individual scale, but it requires coordination: we will all report that dude’s video as a scam so that youtube can rightfully remove it. I would claim it’s a copyright infringement, but the only option youtube gives is “this infringes my copyright”, which isn’t true since it infringes Davee’s copyright (so, Davee, if you read this…).

Long story short, just do the following:

Please go to the youtube page of this video, and click on the small flag icon at the bottom of the video. Then report the video as: Spam -> scam/fraud, then “submit video for review”. I believe that youtube will take action if enough people report the video.

That guy has a blogger account too, but sadly google doesn’t have a clear policy on reporting scammers, unless there’s a clear breach of the law. So let’s leave his blog for now…

Thanks in advance for your help, it’s fun to debunk scammers

Also, if like me you think it’s fun, we could do this on a regular basis, as there are hundreds of such misleading “hacks” on youtube. What do you guys think? Is it childish to report scammers, or does it feel like cleaning up the world a little bit?