I went viral, and scammers stole my face. This is what I did next.

13 million views, 440,000 likes, and climbing, and my heart raced with dread, not excitement. People could be scammed out of MILLIONS of dollars here if I didn’t do something. And worse, it’d be using my face.

Wasn’t going viral supposed to feel amazing? Wasn’t going viral supposed to be a creator’s dream, boost business, and make life better? Instead, here I was at 2am the day after posting, clicking as fast as I could, frantically fighting this scam before it burned down everything I’d built.

My counter against these scammers was the opposite of what most PR companies would recommend, and what this virality ultimately did for Vite will make you question everything you know about internet success.

I’m Tim, CEO/Founder of Vite, and I went viral.

A quick bit of context-- A video of a fitness influencer had gone viral recently, in which he became infamous for dunking his face in ice water multiple times throughout the video as well as rubbing a banana peel on his face. A lot of parodies had started to pop up, and that night, I couldn’t sleep, so I figured... hey, why not make my own parody?

I’m not a fan of copying trends without putting your own spin or flair onto things. I understand why it’s done, but personally, I want to add to it in some way. I figured if I was going to parody it, then I may as well add the obsession business gurus tend to have with ‘efficiency’ and missing the point of doing the things to begin with.

A few minutes later, my face was freezing from smashing into the ice cubes and I had to wipe up all the water that had spilled everywhere. I chuckled to myself, wrote a quick little caption, sent it out and went to bed. There was a certain irony that I posted it at 4am, same as the original, though I was going to bed instead of getting up.

I had no idea what would await me in the morning, and the scam in the dead of night.

“YOUR POST POPPED OFF”
“congrats u went viral”
“Wow a hit tweet”

I woke up to a huge amount of messages, and with bleary eyes, scrolled through them in confusion. What happened?

Apparently this video had caught the algorithm just right, and people loved it. Not just the normal community that would like my posts either-- it’d broken through to every community imaginable. I watched in disbelief as I got a thousand likes a minute, and a waterfall of notifications that blocked my ability to see anything important happening.

I got it all-- meme pages reposting without credit, messages from creators and brands asking if I could post their links in the comments, and everything else in between.

But even as I scrambled to figure out how to set my notifications for just people I followed, I started to notice something strange, something I didn’t think too much of then.

Strange lists of numbers and letters, posted by profiles that had penguins and monkeys as profile pictures that grew in increasing frequency.

Cryptocoin scammers. Of course. But I didn’t have to worry much about that, I thought, I just block them, they go into spam, and that’s that. Every viral post gets bots, after all...

But as day turned into night, the rate of these increased. Not just posts, but followers too, and my “for you” feed started to strangely start showing me increasing amounts of cryptocurrency posts, something I had absolutely no interest in. 

What was going on?

I started to investigate deeper. More importantly... why were these posts saying I was missing out on MY coin? I’d definitely never started a cryptocurrency before, or ever wanted to get involved in them. Why were there an increasing amount of accounts asking me for it, and telling me to get involved?

Then I found it.

See, someone had created a scam cryptocurrency with my video. All these followers, these NFT profile pictures commenting, and the strings of letters and numbers-- it was because a cryptocurrency scam had been created with my video and image!

I’ve seen these before. Crypto scammers would prey on unsuspecting viral hits, creating a “memecoin” with them, promising riches to all those involved, and then do what’s known as a “rugpull,” or the scammers making off with all of the money invested, leaving everyone else holding worthless cryptocurrency that no one would ever see again.

The most infamous case of this is probably the Hawk Tuah girl, who launched her memecoin knowing nothing about cryptocurrency, ultimately scamming tons of people for millions of dollars... and because of this disaster, disappeared from the internet.

And of course, this one had MY video on it, without my knowledge, and it was growing fast. Way too fast, even hitting trending on crypto websites. When I learned about it, there was already $216,000 in, with more people throwing money in by the minute. The amount of people trading it and the money in it was MASSIVE. This scam cryptocurrency was growing at rate even faster than an infamous scamcoin, chillguy, that ended up at $580 million and taking many people’s livelihoods away.

My reputation, and thus also Vite’s, could then be linked to a scam that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

I immediately denounced it on my main post, but the followers continued to increase in volume. I blocked those I could, I hid replies, but it kept going... and all the while, the scammers laughed and taunted me, saying that I couldn’t stop them, that the only option I had was to join them, and then at least I’d have some say in things, so they claimed.

This is a pretty standard tactic they use, with bots spamming everywhere to make it seem more popular than it is, in order to drown out all and any voices that might oppose it, even if the cryptocurrency uses your face.

It’d be easy to despair. It’d be easy to go, well, at least let me make some money on this, try and make it something positive.

I generally avoid places where I’d have to fight, and simply don’t engage in circles where there’s enough rampant toxicity for me to need to push back against. Because of this, I have somewhat of a reputation of being saintly, because I believe in kindness and practice it as best I can. I’m personally not a fan of this reputation, because I see myself as a human being just like everyone else, with equal parts flaws and goodness, always learning and growing and changing. I guess that reputation also may have made scammers think I was an easier target.

Unfortunately for them... I worked in professional kitchens.

From small restaurants to Michelin Star kitchens, it wasn’t just knives I’d learned how to cut with there. Even worse for them, I grew up on the internet, textually sparring in forums, verbally clashing in solo queue of competitive games, and had a lightning fast typing speed and click.

I grabbed a coffee, cracked my fingers, and grinned. I knew it wouldn’t be enough to just be defensive. I couldn’t just counter them. Experience has taught me that much. I had to go on the offensive, take the initiative with my own tempo and make them dance to my tune on the palm of my hand.

If I couldn’t stop them from following me, then why don’t I do something that would hurt their delicate sensibilities, cause them an emotional reaction, and then cut them down while taking control away from them?

Time to cause problems on purpose.

The first step: Block the bot army. I locked my original post’s comments, only allowing people I followed to comment. Of course, this wouldn’t stop them, and would funnel them elsewhere. Sometimes this can spill over to comments on many of your previous posts, making it near impossible to manage...

So, provide them with a big, juicy target that they can’t help but go after. Better yet, use the bots programming against themselves... and the belief structure of cryptobros.

Anyone who’s used twitter before knows how certain words will trigger bots to respond-- ironically, ‘crypto’ is one of these words that triggers this. I expected these bots were likely no different, but it wouldn’t do just to ban the bots. I had to also draw out the creators themselves, or the human aspect, and cut them down just the same.

After all, the reason why my post had been used is because of what it stood for, and the idea(however flawed) behind it. Therefore, if I created a post that was so inflammatory, so disgusting by their standards that they’d get mad at it, because it defiantly and openly showed what I fight for all the time... well.

“crypto is a scam

NFTs are for the gullible”

Hmmm... A good start, for sure, but not enough. They’d just laugh that off. But I also knew what kind of person normally supported these kind of scams, so...

“trans rights are human rights”

Gotta support my friends in the fight meanwhile, right? A lot of them weirdly also hate vtubers a ton, so...

“vtubers are the future”

But no. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The clock was ticking-- between my decision to write the post and now, the market cap had more than doubled, to $440,000. I had to move. So, I decided to drop everything I could think of.

“crypto is a scam

NFTs are for the gullible

trans rights are human rights

vtubers are the future

tax the rich

get vaccinated

i love women

i love men

i love non-binary

chubby body supremacy

muscular body supremacy

immigration makes countries stronger

masculinity is healthy

toxic masculinity is not

feminism is for everyone

more men need therapy

too many new followers that i need to purge, this should do the trick”

I sat back with a grin. I’d even included the last line to point out that the very point of this post was to purge, but I suspected they wouldn’t make it halfway through before they became angry and decided to post.

I also fully expect to get some angry emails/responses from this post as well for the same reasons :^)

I hit the post, and waited to see if my strategy worked.

Within a minute, someone had already responded angrily. I shot off a response and blocked them, and another one popped up. And another, and another, and another, and I laughed, my fingers flying across the keyboard as I responded to one after the other, cutting them down with words and blocking them meanwhile, leaving a graveyard of scammers and unsavory folk behind, one by one.

If words can cut, then call me a Michelin Star chef.

And it worked, beautifully, beyond my wildest dreams.I watched in real-time as their desperately manipulated price chart began to falter. My heart pounded not with fear, but with the adrenaline of everything I’d done. See, momentum is everything for these scamcoins. Image is everything. And importantly for them, narrative is everything to get people to buy into a newly minted coin that has no trust behind it. They tried to convert my words to their advantage, trying to rally their base by telling them they needed to “prove me wrong” and other weak euphemisms, manipulating the value of their coin to try and pump up the value--

But it was too late.

I realized something I'd always known but had begun to forget in the polite world of business-- Kindness doesn’t solve everything.. Sometimes you need to stand and fight.

Fuck turning the other cheek. Fuck going high when they go low. Fuck being quiet and demure and saying ‘just ignore them’.

That kind of cowardice, that kind of inaction and passivity is what lets people like these scammers do what they do. If you can fight, then fight. If you can resist, then resist. And above all, if you can use your voice, then SPEAK.

Be fiery. Be controversial. Be loud, and fight for what you believe in.

Because when I did, and when they came out like worms after rain, like moths to flame, and they were felled one by one, complaining and bitching the entire time, that is when all their momentum was stopped. That’s when it all began to grind to a halt, and their scamcoin start to falter. They tried one last ditch attempt, one big artificial boost-- and it didn’t work. All their momentum was gone. They got to 550k, and it began to slide just as quickly as they started...

And instead of surviving into a scam that would be worth millions, the scamcoin died within hours of its creation. The rug was pulled, and the entire value of the coin cratered in half an hour, 95% of its value gone, just like that... and the bots stopped. The crypto followers stopped.

And my for you page went back to vtubers, human art, esports, cosplay, cooking, and all the other subjects that I cared about. Funnily enough, the post meant to bait out the scammers also ended up getting me significantly more followers than the big viral one, and it ended up doing some good numbers itself.

But amid all this drama and victory against crypto scammers, what about the actual business impact? What did 13 million views actually do for Vite Ramen? I’d dropped a link to Vite to my own viral post, and...

Well. 0 sales.

Turns out viral posts not only suck at getting you the right kind of attention, but also don’t make you any sales.

But hey, if you enjoyed this story, then why not go pick up something from our shop and support our high protein ramen infused with Noodtrients? :^)

-Tim, CEO/Founder Vite