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In French-speaking Africa, the resale of YouTube channels and TikTok accounts is no longer a marginal phenomenon. Every day, creators sell off an audience built over years, while others look to buy an already monetised channel rather than start from scratch.
The need is real: in several countries in the region, access to the platforms’ revenue programmes remains limited or uncertain, and buying an existing channel then looks like a shortcut.
Yet this market operates mostly in WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages and private messages. No rules, no trusted third party, no recourse. Anyone who has dealt in it knows the outcome: the money goes, and the channel never arrives. Here are the seven scam patterns that come up most often, and how to protect yourself.
1. Advance payment “to reserve”
This is the simplest and the most common. The seller demands all or part of the price before handing over anything, claiming another buyer is about to close the deal. Once the mobile money transfer is made, the contact vanishes. The rule is simple: never pay a stranger directly, and use an intermediary that only releases the money once the buyer has confirmed access.
2. The seller who takes the account back after the sale
The sale seems to go well: the buyer receives login details, signs in, even posts a few videos. Then, a few days later, the account slips out of their hands. The seller kept the recovery email address or phone number and simply ran a “forgot password” procedure. On YouTube, there is a safeguard: the channel must be linked to a Brand Account, and the buyer must become its primary owner. Google imposes a seven-day delay before this change, so payment should be planned accordingly rather than settled in full on day one.
3. Inflated figures
A YouTube Studio screenshot can be altered in minutes. Monthly revenue, views, watch time: everything can be doctored. A serious seller should agree to have these figures checked at the source, for example by sharing their screen live, recording a video of themselves navigating YouTube Studio, or granting read-only access to their analytics. A systematic refusal is a warning sign in itself.
4. The “monetised” channel that no longer is
A channel may have been monetised and then lost that status: reused content, copyright strikes, violations of community guidelines. The buyer then pays for an asset that no longer earns anything, or that is one strike away from being deleted. Before any payment, ask for the monetisation status, the strike history and the list of pending Content ID claims.
5. Bought subscribers
A channel showing one hundred thousand subscribers may have no real audience. Subscribers bought in bulk do not watch videos, do not comment and earn nothing. The best indicator is not the number of subscribers but the ratio between that number and the views on the latest videos. A channel with one hundred thousand subscribers whose videos top out at a few hundred views calls for the utmost caution.
6. The account opened in a “fake country”
To get around geographic restrictions, some sellers offer TikTok or YouTube accounts registered in a country eligible for monetisation, while they are run from another. The practice exposes the buyer to outright suspension. The risk is particularly high on TikTok: an academic study published in 2024 on accounts offered for sale online found that about half of the TikTok accounts analysed had been banned, against a small minority of YouTube channels. Buyers should also know that TikTok’s terms of service prohibit transferring an account without the platform’s permission.
7. The fake intermediary
The last pattern is the most insidious, because it exploits the buyer’s caution. The buyer asks for a trusted third party; the seller proposes one, who turns out to be an accomplice, sometimes using a name or logo that imitates a well-known service. The intermediary must be chosen by the buyer, independently verifiable, and never imposed by the seller.
What these scams have in common
They all rest on the same asymmetry: the seller holds the information and the access, the buyer holds the money, and nothing obliges either to respect the other. Researchers who study these markets have also shown that channel resale fuels other abuses: a Cornell University study of several thousand channels resold on a major international platform found that a significant share of them were later used to spread misleading content or scams.
Yet three principles are enough to eliminate most fraud and clean up this market. First, proof of ownership: the seller must show they really control the channel, for example by placing a code in its description, without ever sharing a password. Second, payment through a third party: the money is released to the seller only after the buyer confirms. Finally, an assisted, dated, step-by-step transfer that leaves a record in case of dispute.
The channel resale market will not disappear. The question is whether it will remain in the hands of informal groups, or whether it will be structured with clear rules, for the benefit of the African creators who built these audiences. It is up to us, the region’s digital players, to make the second choice.
Aboubakrine Diagne is the founder of MELA Market, a Dakar-based marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of YouTube channels and TikTok accounts.
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