Scammers publish short videos in Russian on the YouTube Shorts service, through which they deceive Russian schoolchildren and steal money from them under the pretext of making money in an easy way and in a short time, Kaspersky Lab experts said about this. The scheme of cybercriminals is published on the company's blog.

The videos are only the first stage of a multi-level scam designed to lure and steal money from minors under the pretext of making easy money online. The YouTube channel that used this scam posted similar videos, all with the #Minecraft hashtag and footage from the game in the thumbnail photo.

"This is done so that the channel appears more often in the videos recommended to potential victims considered the target audience. The short video contains a link to a full video already published on another YouTube channel," the blog post states.

"Kaspersky Laboratory" clarified that schoolchildren are offered to earn money without investment on the Internet using the popular crypto exchange Telegram bot, the link of which is attached to the full video.

The Telegram bot first offers to transfer real money to the e-wallet account, and the victims are promised that the amount will be doubled in a week, while the goal of the criminals is actually to steal the money transferred․

“The video already had 156,000 views when we discovered it. There were more than 150 comments under the video, and most of them, as expected, are positive։ criminals deliberately leave positive feedback," explained Olga Svistunova, a content analyst at Kaspersky Lab.