When it comes to launching your game, reaching out to content creators and press is usually your first port of call. However, key resellers posing as creators or the press can be a big issue for developers and result in countless lost sales.

If you’ve launched a game recently, I’m sure you will have experienced the influx of hundreds of emails suddenly dropping into your inbox filled with key requests from creators of all sizes and platforms.

This is an all too familiar situation for indie developers launching on Steam and with several titles under our belt, including Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun and Mars Horizon, we've had ample experience identifying the real creators in our inbox.

In this article we’re going to be sharing all the tricks we know for identifying fake creators on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok so that you don’t give away your hard-earned game keys to scammers.

But first, what’s a key scammer?

A key scammer is usually someone who is either impersonating a content creator or a member of the press OR someone who makes a fake account to try and trick you into giving them one or more keys for your game. Instead of redeeming these keys, more often than not they’ll resell them on gray-market sites to make a profit.

If you’ve been in the game development space, you’ll be more than familiar with these scammers but over the years technology has improved, new social media sites have become popular, AI has become a thing, and these scams are at the point where they can trick even the most keen-eyed developers.

So how can you spot key scammers?

In this article we’re going to be going through all the red flags you should be looking out for in emails when these fake creators reach out to you, as well as red flags you should look for on their social media profiles to let you know if they’re botting their accounts.

As they’re the first point of contact, let’s get started by looking at some of the emails you may receive from key scammers.

How do you tell if an email is fake?

When you receive an email from a creator, the first thing most people do is click through to their YouTube channel to see if it’s a real channel.

But when it is and it’s for a big creator, how do you tell if the email is also real?

Here’s an example

One of the first things to look at is the email address. You should always double check the spelling of any email address against their publicly available contact email and keep an eye out for misspellings or trick letters.

Most of the emails you receive from big creators will be some sort of trick, whether they’re doubling letters, replacing ‘m’ with ‘rn’, using ‘i’ instead of ‘j’, ‘o’ instead of ‘0’ or something similar. We’ve even seen some instances where they replace gmail with hotmail, or viceversa.

Alternatively, some emails will use characters from other languages like ɑ from the Cyrillic alphabet, which is very similar to a.

The quickest and easiest way to check is to paste both emails into a Word document and compare them.

You should always verify an email is the legit email address of a creator by checking it against the information provided on their channels.

Screenshot of the Auroch digital youtube channel showing how to find email addresses

YouTube has a useful ’view email address’ feature that you can access by pressing the more button on their profile and selecting it from the pop up. Most creators also have their email available to access via their social media channels.

When it comes to press reaching out for a key, typically if they’re a part of the larger gaming sites, they’ll have a futurenet.com or similar as their domain. Scammers won’t be able to do this so always be skeptical of emails from press who claim to come from these larger sites but are using gmail.

Also, when it comes to press, it’s worth checking their website or their social media sites as many of them will have their emails publicly available for easier access.

screenshot of the rock paper shotgun staff page and Austin Wood and Andy Brown’s twitter bios

How do you tell if a content creator is fake?

When it comes to fake content creators this is slightly harder to determine.

How do you spot a fake YouTube Account?

On YouTube, many of them will look like real accounts with between 10-30k subscribers so as not to look suspicious and several videos that also appear to have real views and comments.

screenshot of an example youtube account

One of the immediate giveaways with these accounts is that their thumbnails all follow a very similar format.

They’ll be nearly identical with the game’s capsule art thrown onto the background with a little bit of text written over the top. There generally isn’t a photo of the creator or any personalised text about the game on the thumbnail and likewise the video title is typically just the name of the game + Review or Let’s Play.

Here are some other examples for you to compare:

Screenshots of two More example youtube accounts

If we check their community tab, you’ll also see that they’re either A) not posting at all or B) they did many years ago and all those videos have now been removed, suggesting that this account has been hacked.

Screenshot of community tab showing multiple videos that aren't publicly available

When you click into the videos, more often than not the first few videos will have the same person doing the voiceover, but as you click through older videos, you’ll see the voices start changing dramatically as quality lowers. They don’t expect you to check them so usually they put less effort into them and there is a much wider variation of voices and volume levels.

Another thing you’ll notice quite quickly when checking out the videos is that they will never say their name or the name of the channel. This is so they can reuse the video across multiple channels without worrying about needing to change the intro.

The video descriptions are also another big giveaway with many of the videos only having a small description of the game or, in some cases, no description at all.

Screenshot of a video description that reads “no description has been added to this video”

Finally, another indicator is the comments on the video. Most of the time the comments on the video will have no responses, no upvotes or hearts, and this is because neither the creator nor the other viewers are interacting with one another – which is weird if they were an actual creator.

And there’s another big red flag when it comes to the comments.

The example below is taken from a Fae Farm video that was on one of the spam YouTube accounts – sadly this is no longer active so I can’t share a link.

Screenshot of a fake comment section alongside the very real comment section of Kanzalone’s video

On the left is the video from the fake YouTube account and on the right is Kanzalone’s video about Fae Farm.

Kanzalone is a real creator with nearly 60k subscribers who has been creating gaming let’s play videos for several years, but do you notice anything suspicious about the comments on both these videos?

That’s right – all these comments have been lifted directly from Kanzalone’s video, even the ones that have his name in the comment (look at the comment on the left from @priya_wishfor1k493).

This is really common and a way to make the videos look more legit by lifting comments from another video about the same game, but instances like this do slip through. So, make sure to check the comments to see if they mention the name of another channel or creator.

While you’re at it, also compare the number of likes and hearts on the scam account vs Kanz's legitimate comments. The comments on the left have no interactions, which is another clear sign of a fake account, while the comments on Kanz’s post have many likes and hearts.

These are the main indicators of a fake account. Other indicators include having no social accounts linked to the channel or not having a full bio written out for the page.

So, to recap, these are the red flags you should be looking out for when it comes to fake YouTubers:

Easy to replicate thumbnails with little to no personalisation.
All video titles essentially boil down to Game Name + Review
No community posts or removed posts in community section.
Voices don’t match on videos
No video description or only description is the Steam Short Description or similar.
No engagement with comments
Comments are lifted from another popular video about the same game.

How do you spot a fake Twitch Streamer?

But what about Twitch?

Twitch is much harder when it comes to identifying fake accounts, but there are several giveaways.

Firstly, streaming with no webcam or microphone is a big indicator. This doesn’t include creators who may use vtubers or pngtubers instead of a webcam. But if there’s no mic and a video is just gameplay with no voiceover, this can be very suspicious.

Additionally, these fake streamers typically stream between 1-2 hours and only go live once a week.

While none of these factors are suspicious on their own, when together it can cause some red flags.

For the next steps, it’s also worth checking over their About pages to see if there are any red flags there. For this account, there’s a lot of information on their about page, which makes it look legit.

However, they claim to stream three times a week, mainly Minecraft and Warzone, but looking at their videos they’re only streaming once a week, as per the red flag above, and they’re completely random games like Atomic Picnic, Geo-Political Simulator 5, and Bronana.

This suggests that this was probably someone else’s account that has been hacked and is now being used to run this scam. Notice how there’s also mention of a Discord but no link to be seen and no social media links either.

Similarly, this channel promises a Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube account but none of them are linked anymore and the one linked channel no longer exists...

Looking at the videos themselves, most of them just have the name of the game as a title, which isn’t very common for legit streamers.

Additionally looking at the chat is a huge giveaway as well.

Screenshot of a twitch livestream with chat showing

This game is called Baladins, which I’ve personally played a ton of. There aren’t really “recommended builds” in this game, you can’t run or die, and one person refers to “you all” when there is only one person playing.

Similarly, on another stream for On Your Tail, someone says “nice shot!! Good Aim” for a mystery life sim game.

Another thing worth noting is that they never seem to play the same game twice!

Let’s recap all that information I just threw at you! The red flags when it comes to Twitch Streamers are:

Streaming with no microphone or webcam/vtube model
Barebones About page/filled out About page with inconsistent information
No links to other social media platforms
Fake chat
Plays a wide range of games but never the same game twice.

How do you spot a fake TikTok Account?

Verifying a TikTok creator is difficult as it’s still a relatively new platform, but we have a few ways to check their validity.

The first step is to look at followers.

Followers of a fake TikTok account usually won’t have any profile photos and if you click through to their accounts, you will see that they’re either A) private or B) have little or no content. This is a sign that these are bought accounts used to inflate the numbers.

Some of these accounts may also have very similar names that appear to be a variation of one and another.

Also, the fact they’re not following anyone is highly suspicious too!

Another sign to look out for is the engagement ratio for their account. Many fake accounts inflate their views and forget to inflate their engagement in line with that.

Using a tool like vidiq’s chrome extension can show you the engagement rate for videos directly on their profile pages. Personally, I use the 10% rule – for a video to go viral, usually their likes need to be 10% of their views. If this is not the case, then it’s likely a botted account.

For example, this video has 165,000 views, but only 3,291 likes. Using the 10% rule, this video should only be at around 30,000 views, but instead it has 5x more than that! Likewise, this video had no comments at all!

UPDATE: Looking back at this video now, the video is now full of detailed comments about the game, but they were all posted on the same day (11/8) nearly two months after the video was first posted (9/21)! Also, as with the comments on YouTube, none of these comments have likes or interactions...

Comments including multiple emojis and nothing else are another sign of bot activity.

Screenshot of tiktok comments made up of a series of emojis

But even if there are written comments, you should also review them and determine if the comments make sense for the video in question or even just scan through for prompts – which you’ll see in the screenshot below. There are also many instances of the exact same comments repeated multiple times.

Screenshot of the tiktok comment section

Another giveaway is their profile picture. Many fake TikTok accounts won’t use an image of themselves for their profile picture. Instead, they’ll use random images that they’ve found online that could resemble a logo.

By reverse-image searching these images, you will be able to see who they are associated with and if they point elsewhere than the account you’re researching, this could be a sign they are also fake.

Reverse image searching the icon on this account led to many more fake accounts:

Reverse image search of the channel logo

Let’s take a look at the bio while we’re here as well.

There’s very limited info in this bio and you’ll notice that the email address isn’t directly linked to this channel – this is so they can reuse the email address across multiple channels. There also aren’t any links to other accounts like a YouTube channel, website or somewhere else that shows that this is a real content creator or brand.

Most creators on TikTok will be actively posting content at least once or twice a week to promote their accounts. But these fake accounts will regularly have very active periods where they’re posting incredibly often and then fall off completely.

Therefore, it’s worth reviewing how often they are posting and how long they have been posting for.

And finally, looking at the videos posted by these accounts is another major giveaway.

Do these videos have the TikTok watermark on their video? If so, they are likely a bot who has downloaded someone else’s video and reuploaded it.

None of these methods are foolproof, but when used in conjunction with one and another they should be useful for indicating if an account is real or fake. So, let’s summarise them quickly:

Suspicious followers with no profile image/personalised handle or private accounts.
Very low engagement in comparison to views, both for likes and comments.
Suspicious comments that are either emoji spam, one or two words, or long comments that are repeated, not related to the video, or include prompts.
No interactions on comments.
Commonly used profile picture rather than something unique to their channel.
Bio is very simple and doesn’t contain links to other channels.
Don’t post consistently.
Watermarked videos.

Conclusion

Ultimately, if it doesn’t feel right then it probably isn’t. If a creator doesn’t cover games like yours or asks for multiple codes for a non-multiplayer game, then something fishy may be going on.

If you’re ever in doubt, then try reaching out to them on their social media accounts to verify if it’s actually them! If they did request a key for your game, then they’d be keen to let you know they’re real and, if they didn’t, maybe you’ll spark their interest by reaching out.

It can be time-consuming to review all the fake requests that come into your inbox, but it can be worth it for the actual streamers and content creators hiding in there!

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How to Spot a Key Scammer