According to some court documents filed on July 3rd, YouTube has been added as a defendant in a class action lawsuit against BitConnect. The lawsuit was initially filed on January 24th by six individuals represented by the Silver Miller law firm. The applicants claim that the cryptocurrency investment platform BitConnect issued crypto tokens which were unregistered securities, and obtained additional funds through a wide range of Ponzi Schemes.
The plaintiffs stated that their personal losses amounted to a total of $771,000.
According to Cointelegraph, BitConnect and its affiliated parties published a series of promotional videos on YouTube, which were deemed inappropriate as the material allegedly attracted potential investors to a fraudulent investment scheme. YouTube is said to have failed to declassify and demonetize published videos, exposing “countless” YouTube users to harmful videos and illegally promoting investment.
YouTube and Google LLC involved in a class action lawsuit against BitConnect
BitConnect’s top ten YouTube affiliates posted more than 70,000 hours of raw content, generating about 58 billion hits. The document says that the number of views from several of the affiliate promoters’ videos far exceeded the threshold numbers for the “enhanced” eligibility standards.
In particular, some users reported fraudulent BitConnect activity to YouTube, posting videos with titles such as “How the BitConnect scam works in great detail,” “Craig Grant explains the BitConnect scam” and others.
This case is not about YouTube being the speaker or editor of your website’s content. Instead, the liability is based on YouTube’s inability to act after learning from content published directly on YouTube from the easily foreseeable damage posed by its advertising partners. As the old saying goes, “Sometimes when you sleep with dogs, you get fleas.”
David Silver, Silver Miller law firm, for Cointelegraph
The plaintiffs claim that if YouTube had done a proper search of their databases, it would have removed the harmful videos from BitConnect. Instead, YouTube allegedly accepted an increasing number of videos related to BitConnect, resulting in numerous victims.
The document also refers to Google LLC, which changed its financial products policy to prohibit all ads related to cryptocurrency and associated content due to potential harm to users of Google-owned platforms, including YouTube.
