Johnny Dee, who has delighted his YouTube followers by covering songs from musical luminaries like Snoop Dogg and Jake Paul, said his channel was stolen from him by a scammer. Now the senior YouTuber is in the process of uploading his old videos to a new channel, but it’s unclear if he can reclaim the money he makes under YouTube’s new monetization guidelines.
Johnny Dee, whose real name is John De Nardis, grew in popularity after posting karaoke-style cover song videos.
Only a couple weeks after PewDiePie, the most-followed YouTube star, featured Johnny Dee in a video that earned nearly 3 million views, Dee lost his channel.
Dee posted a video last week saying a scam artist was to blame.
“I didn’t think people could [have] that much evil,” he said in the video below.
He said the scammer messaged him on Facebook, pretending to be a record company employee looking to sign him to a deal. That apparently prompted Dee to send the scammer his password. In the video, he called himself computer illiterate, and he hoped YouTube would give him back his channel that he said he’s spent the last eight years building.
YouTube did not respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment.
According to Polygon, Dee’s former channel hosted more than 1,000 of his videos. He started his new channel on Jan. 14, and he’s spent much of the past few days uploading his old videos. It’s unclear if his old channel has been deleted.
Dee is also concerned about his YouTube paycheck.
Under YouTube’s new monetization guidelines—which, as the website described them, were put in place so “spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors can’t hurt our ecosystem or take advantage of you”—content creators will lose access to the YouTube Partner Program if they can’t keep a subscription base of 1,000 or maintain 4,000 watch hours for the previous 12 months.
As of this writing, Dee is safely above the subscriber barrier (he’s currently at more than 15,000 subscriptions), but the 4,000-hour mark might be a tough obstacle as he begins his new channel, especially since it’s presumed that much of his base is made up of former subscribers who have already seen his videos.
Either way, it sounds like he’s learned a lesson—and he’s warning others about the dangers of scams.
“There a bunch of crooks on the internet,” he said. “Be careful. Don’t be as stupid as I am. You can’t trust the internet anymore. There’s too many hackers.”
H/T Polygon