YouTube channels are being sold and repurposed to spread scams and disinformation, says new research

YouTubers dedicate their lives to building a following in hopes of creating and sustaining a livelihood. For top creators, the rewards are immense: MrBeast, the world’s biggest YouTuber, is estimated to be worth $1 billion.

It’s no surprise, then, that YouTube channels are valuable assets, often bought and sold for significant sums. A new study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv reveals that 1 in every 400 YouTube channels has changed hands on third-party platforms, frequently undergoing complete transformations in the process.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed Fameswap—a kind of eBay for social media profiles—cataloging 4,641 YouTube channels with a combined 823 million subscribers listed for sale between October 2024 and March 2025. They then tracked which of those channels sold, confirming more than $1 million in transactions during that six-month period.

“It was really remarkable,” says Alejandro Cuevas, the paper’s lead author.

A YouTube spokesperson said that selling accounts violates the platform’s Terms of Service, and the company will take action if such activity is detected. “If we detect that bad actors are creating channels with the intent to scam, mislead, spam, or defraud other users, we terminate those channels,” the spokesperson tells Fast Company.

Given the high prices paid, new owners are eager to see a return on their investment. About one in four of the tracked channels—representing a combined 220 million followers—were completely overhauled within 30 days, with changes to their handle, title, and description that erased any connection to the original identity.

The researchers found that these revamped channels continued to gain subscribers over the following 12 weeks, suggesting most viewers didn’t notice the switch. However, many new owners weren’t focused on producing quality content: 37% of repurposed channels later promoted material flagged by YouTube as potentially harmful—especially political disinformation, crypto schemes, and gambling ads.

A follow-up analysis by the same researchers of 1.4 million randomly selected channels from analytics platform Social Blade revealed that around 0.25% showed similar patterns of transformation.

The growing trade in YouTube channels reflects broader shifts in how we consume content, says Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a coauthor on the study. “Part of the reason why this is so prevalent right now is because systematically, in these platforms, we’ve seen a decrease in the agency over what we consume,” he says. Knowing that a channel already has an audience and a veneer of credibility makes it easier to push new content into users’ feeds.

“The shortform content paradigm facilitates this a lot, because in the past, you would search for channels directly, maybe by name, or be more aware of that,” says Cuevas. “This just makes it more fertile ground for these type of thing.”