Scam on Jimmy Tries World (jimmytriesworld) on YouTube in response to a reply I wrote.

I recently watched an interesting video on the YouTube channel Jimmy Tries World (jimmytriesworld). I like to thank creators to show my appreciation. Much to my surprise I received the following reply letting me know I'd won a brand new 'Giveaway.

The image in the reply is Jimmy's image but the '@jimmytriesworld on telegram' wasn't the name of the YouTube channel. Of course Jimmy may have been making an offer for marketing purposes so I couldn't be sure. I've not seen scams on YouTube like this before so I thought the best way to confirm was to post another comment. Whilst I felt it was unlikely I'd get a reply since Jimmy gets thousands of comments I was pleasantly surprised that Jimmy responded and confirmed the reply was a scam. Here's a copy of the reply.

Hopefully by sharing this example of a YouTube scam it helps others to spot YouTube scams. Whilst I've been using YouTube for a while as a creator and I'm an IT consultant, scams that I've not seen before could easily trick. The only lesson I can pass on really is trust your instinct. If something surprises you, is unexpected, may even get you interested, pause for a moment and do some investigating. A moment's pause may save you a lot of grief. In this case I hadn't entered a competition so it didn't make sense, but that's not to say there was a competition running I wasn't aware of. So I started doing searches on Google and found the reply was most likely a scam.

Thanks also to Jimmy for taking the time to respond and confirm the reply was a scam. I should point out this scam has nothing to do with Jimmy, just scammers finding another way to trick people.

Kelvin

Seagate external hard drive failure with bad block, format drive message.

Ever get that sinking feeling your hard drive has failed. Yep. Happened to me. Now usually I have a backup of my files but this time I was using a new hard drive as a backup to my dashcam memory card to copy files before they got overwritten. There in lies my failure. I only have a single copy of the dashcam file and now they're gone. About a month and a half of dashcam files. Not a huge problem losing the files but it is very disappointing.

I tried quite a few programs to recover the files and quite a few didn't do anything and so far haven't recovered the files. I thought I'd share the outcome of each program I tried.

Easeus (trial version)
The trial version of Easeus doesn't allow you to save files but can in theory show you what the program can recover. I didn't let the program complete as it was reporting bad sectors and was taking an extremely long time. What it did show however was interesting. There were many files on the external drive I didn't put there. That was a reminder that Windows uses the external drive as temporary storage which increases the risk of the disk failing. Note to self for future. Unplug external drives when not in use. I think that was my main mistake and may have led to the external disk failing.

Recuva
Nothing

Disk Drill
Nothing

DiskGenius
Nothing

TestDisk/Photorec
Nothing from Photorec. Nothing so far from TeskDisk but hopeful something might be returned.

Remo Recover
Nothing

In other words so far everything I have tried has failed. I'll update this post if I have any success.

Kelvin