Chalk this up to a long history of YouTube and all social media not caring about content moderation. Any safety and security measures are lip service. Bots are everywhere and apparently not just dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders and a, “Well what can you do?”, they seem to be embraced. More clicks. More views. More likes. More algorithmic sharing.
I already expect some of you are leaning into the defense that will be used if challenged directly. “How dare you insinuate this poor, sick girl is not real you MONSTER!!” Which is all part of the scam. I’m gonna go on a little overdue side quest here to explain about what organized crime doesn’t get about long term macroeconomics and science. If you are a bandit warlord, and you raid the village for food every day you run the risk of the village dying off and no longer able to create a surplus for your demanded tribute. Substitute pizza shop in the run down section of town no longer able to pay the protection money. If the shop has something go wrong, like unexpected medical issue for the owner, it could fold and therefore your protection money source is gone. And if the neighborhood has a reputation for blood being squeezed from stones, you get an empty shop. There are too many competing warlords. All of them think they should be paid and the others should be ignored. Instead of a shop owner sickness being the straw that breaks the camels back, now it’s climate change expense that will prevent economic viability on top of the tribute. And science and human ingenuity can only go so far when one political party is dead set on breaking shit as much as possible and as fast as possible to get their tribute today.
And on to the actual scam… of course AI is involved. All the fun stuff that makes life easier for scammers gets boosted. In fact, I’ve known about Isabella for over a month now. That in itself is one of the red flags. At first I wasn’t going to say anything, there is a principal in complaining about grifters that you don’t give them extra oxygen. Well, Isabella isn’t going away any time soon, so let’s go over the red flags.
My first experience was on a Veritasium video. This one is from Kurzgesagt, their trademark cartoon bird shown in the screen shot. Wildly popular, each individual getting millions of views. Quality content aimed at the smarter crowd. So while a lot of gematria type bullshit, how exactly do you trick smarter people into believing what you are up to?
Volume. Mass mailing your Nigerian prince email. And then let the suckers come to you and prove they are suckers by biting at the bait. You don’t bother wasting your time with a gematria video that has a couple thousand views on a good day. You get one that has millions and see who bites, like subscribing to your fake channel. Although the people dumb enough to be involved with gematria are a higher percentage chance of falling for stupid shit, the volume more than makes up for it.
That’s a bad sign that this comment is a month old. In theory YouTube could have noted the suspicious nature. In theory Kurzgesagt could have someone moderating and deleted it as soon as things turned weird. But there it is. Clicking in to Isabella’s channel- the same video story, the same picture as was used with the Veritasium video from before. There’s no doubt in my mind the picture is fake. At best it was hijacked from somewhere else. It’s more likely completely AI generated. Isabella and her doctor are both pretty. Indeed, for a little girl DYING of cancer, not just being treated for it, Isabella looks pretty darn good. It’s strange to see a girl dying for several months minimum look that fine.
And the video, the last video the dying girl will ever make, is actually 4 months old and from a different channel than Isabella’s personal channel. The same video as when I found her through Veritasium. Playing some very kiddish video game hike narrating with a voice that sounds…robotic. No updates from concerned parents or other family. Exceptionally noteworthy is nothing from this other sister that the diary is shared with. And Isabella’s channel was created June 3rd, 2025. To house one video and one video only from 4 months ago?!? 🚩 🚩 🚩 🚩🚩
And the comments are insane. There’s an obvious mismatch between what the responses are compared to the comment. A comment that has plainly (edited). That’s how this works. The bot says something early, possibly deeply relevant to the video. (The Veritasium comment was about church architecture and changed to dying of cancer. And that was on their “Most dangerous building” video from two months ago. I did report that one and it’s gone now.) Then the switch, the poor little girl dying of cancer and after racking up likes and replies this weird mash up of twisted commentary is left behind.
And some of the commenters KNOW this is fake. This guy (Isabella must have used a different picture) is about to talk about cancer. They’ve seen it before. And at least 63 people upvoted that comment, likely because they’ve also seen it before. For a little girl dying of cancer, Isabella sure gets around to posting comments on videos a lot.
Also note that the playing the game on the “last video I’ll ever make” video is locked down from commentary. The author doesn’t want some goody two shoes to spoil the comments by pointing out the scammy nature on the one piece of material that took some effort to create.
As for me not being the monster I would expect to be painted as, well good luck having pediatric cancer advancements in the near future. Tax cuts for the wealthy don’t mix well with pediatric cancer funding, hurricane warnings, on the job safety, education including funding for public broadcasting, etc…. These things are going to be gone sooner than you think.