Many people would probably consider themselves quite adept at spotting "fake" videos of some sort, videos that seem to depict something extraordinary but which have been staged. Or at the very least, they think of themselves at least knowledgeable about what types of videos could perhaps be fake (even if they can't tell for sure if they are). Yet time and again videos pop up on YouTube that get enormously popular, with millions and millions of views, that turn out to be completely (and deliberately) misleading, faked, staged or fabricated.
This is not something completely inconsequential, though. That's especially if said videos get millions of views and are monetized, which means that the video creators are getting thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars from them. If they are not disclosing the true nature of the video this is at a very minimum borderline fraud. In some cases even worse (as seen in the examples below).
As mentioned, these are not just the kind of video that one could easily suspect could be fake, such as videos seemingly depicting UFOs, or strange creatures, or impossible feats of skill (such as throwing something and hitting something that seems almost impossible). These subjects are often things that people don't even think of as being possibly faked.
Some examples include:
- Fake "restoration" videos.
There are many, many completely legit restoration video channels on YouTube, where the author takes old or broken/dirty/rusted objects or devices (such as antique objects, or things like game consoles) and restores them to pristine condition.
However, there are also fake "restoration" videos. Very typically such a video will depict the author getting or finding a device (such as a gaming console) in extremely poor condition, extremely dirty and mangled, and seemingly completely unusable, and restoring it to pristine condition. In reality the shots in the video are shown pretty much in reverse: In other words, in actual reality the author took a pristine device and started breaking it down and dirtying it until it looked like it was at the beginning of the video. (The footage isn't reversed, but the order in which the video clips are shown is pretty much reversed.) The video is cleverly edited so that it looks like the person is cleaning it up and restoring it, rather than the reverse.
- Fake "primitive building" videos.
These are videos depicting one or sometimes two guys building incredible constructs and buildings in the middle of the jungle using completely primitive tools made of materials found around, allegedly over the span of hundreds of days.
In this case there actually aren't many YouTube channels that do this genuinely. There are maybe one or two in existence. In the vast majority of case the videos are fraudulent: In actual reality it's an entire team of people using modern machinery to create the constructs in a couple of weeks. All this is completely hidden from the viewer (well, at least as best as they can, as sometimes evidence of machinery or there being an entire team of people gets accidentally left in the shown footage).
(One telltale distinguishing sign of whether the video is fake or whether it might be genuine is the overall "coolness" factor of the end result. If the end result is outlandishly "awesome", rather than it just being some kind of primitive-looking hut, it's likely to be fake. If the end result has a pool of blue water, it's almost 100% certainly a fake video. This is because it's just not possible to paint the walls of a pool blue, or dye the water blue, with materials that you can find in the wilderness, especially a jungle.)
- Fake "challenge" videos.
YouTube is stock full of popular people who for the lack of a better word can be called entertainers: They do lots and lots of varied things in order to just make entertaining and funny videos. One popular subject of these videos is for the video creator or creators to engage in all kinds of silly or sometimes even involved challenges. There are tons and tons of different types of "challenges" that they come up with, but one kind is the type of "do something for X amount of time". Such as, for example, "stay at (some place) for X amount of hours/days/whatever".
Problem is, while some of this type of challenge may be genuine, a lot of it is staged and faked. One very popular type of challenge is "stay at (some location/building) for 24 hours". One particular variant being "stay inside (some big retail chain store) for 24 hours (without permission) from the owners."
The problem? In a good portion of the cases, if not even the majority, they actually do ask permission from the store owners (but this isn't conveyed to the viewers). And, in fact, they usually don't even stay there for the entirety of the 24 hours. They might stay for a couple of hours in total (at different times of day) in order to shoot enough footage to create a 15-minute video which is edited to look like they have spent the entire 24 hours there. Typically the footage will have several segments where they are hiding, whispering, while some staff is walking around, them in danger of being found. These will all be just staged and acted.
Not all of these videos are fake and staged, but many are (perhaps even a good majority).
- Fake "high stakes coin pusher" videos.
A somewhat popular genre of YouTube video is one where the author is (seemingly) playing a coin pusher machine in some casino. Except that he's not just playing to get some quarters, as (in addition to lots of quarters) there are extremely valuable objects in there, such as high-value casino chips (up to even $1000), gold coins, rolls of cash, and so on. At the start of the video the inside of the coin pusher will usually look very lavish, with towers and walls made of coins and casino chips. The youtuber usually alleges that the machine cannot just be played with normal quarters, but that you have to purchase quarters in order to play it (which makes it "high stakes"). One single quarter, which can be used to play the coin pusher, can cost $100, $1000, or even $100000, depending on the video. The total value of all the objects in the machine is (allegedly) multiple times that.
However, the vast majority if not all such videos are completely fake and staged. It's just someone who bought a coin pusher machine and is using it in his home, with fake casino chips, fake gold coins and gold bars, fake wads of cash, etc. The video will be made more convincing by having typical casino sounds playing in the background.
Telltale signs that such a video is fake and staged: The video never specifies which casino this is supposed to be in and is never named (note that there are no such "high stakes" coin pushers in Vegas or Nevada), the price of the quarters is atrociously high (such as 100 thousand dollars apiece), the camera is fixed to show only the interior of the coin pusher, and the author never turns the camera around or in any other way shows the rest of the casino, and there never is any sort of interruptions or even the sound of other people talking nearby.
Where this becomes borderline (or even outright) fraud is when the author has a Patreon account to "help him play" those coin pusher games.
- Fake "animal rescue" videos.
This is once again a case where the vast, vast majority of videos are genuine, but then there are a few channels that create fake staged videos. In other words, rather than the authors finding an animal in trouble and rescuing it, they instead stage the situation and put the poor animal in the predicament and then "rescue" it.
This one is especially heinous because it's not only fraudulent but also outright animal abuse. It's also especially despicable fraud in that it tugs at the heartstrings and empathy of people (while the other two types above just go for the coolness factor, rather than the human empathy factor.)
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