It was great to hear from Ian Rafalko again this week. If you remember, we were first blown away by his viral announcement on TikTok, explaining that he was the son of Dr. Eric Berg, the YouTube phenom with 8 million subscribers who dispenses a lot of diet advice.
Ian drew attention to the fact that the very popular Dr. Berg is also a big time Scientology donor, and that Ian himself had been brought up in the church and had worked as a staffer in Atlanta.
Ian broke away from Scientology and is estranged from his father, who is a chiropractor. (Scientology loves to prey on chiropractors.)
After that initial splash on TikTok, Ian made a longer YouTube video about his time in Scientology, he appeared on Leah Remini’s podcast, and he also spoke to us about a lawsuit filed against Berg by one of his former employees.
This time, Ian drew our attention to some really entertaining videos he’s been posting at TikTok. In them, he says he’s caught his father gaming YouTube in a way that should get him in trouble with the video platform.
“This is my dad’s YouTube subscribers, every week. Crazy. Wow,” he says in the first video, pointing to Berg’s subscriber numbers. “Oh wow, look at all that realistic numbering,” he says sarcastically, citing the regularity of the daily increase in subscribers, and the low resulting views for an account with 8 million subscribers. For Ian the conclusion is inescapable: “It’s almost evident that you’re buying fake subs and fake views, which is what you see when you look at his profile.”
Days later, Ian followed that up with another video and announced to his audience that everything was fine now. “It’s OK, he stopped…buying them every day of the week,” he quips. Ian points to new numbers suggesting that his father is now buying new subscribers only every other day.
And Ian also claimed some credit for the change affecting Berg’s monthly new subscribers, which had fallen by some 70 percent.
“The moral of the story here is if you’re going to abuse your kids, be prepared that one day, that they may abuse you back, and you’ll deserve it,” he says in the TikTok.
And then, he says, his father reacted by taking down his Twitter account.
We told him we thought his new videos were startling and effective.
“When I worked for him, he had been reached out to by a team of Russian people who were translating and posting his videos in Russian for free, and they also had nearly identical traffic, so my guess is he got help from some Russian bot farm, as bizarre as that sounds,” he told us.
Ian says that the information he’s uncovered should get Berg in trouble with YouTube, and he’s made a report. But so far, the video giant hasn’t shown any interest.
“I don’t know what their process is, but I reported those channels twice after talking to Team YT on Twitter,” he tells us. “However, it seems irrelevant how I feel, considering YouTube is a big platform and I’m just one person without any sway to prioritize such things, The only way I feel like they would look into it as if there were many more reports. How is it he can be at almost 9 million subscribers, and yet still almost never break a million views on his videos? and you’ll check his Social Blade and you’ll see that his trends are suspicious as fuck. Any experienced YouTuber who gained their audience honestly would take one look and it would be clear his numbers are bullshit. I’m doing nothing more than holding someone I believe to be very dishonest person accountable.”
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Ian Rafalko perfectly illustrates the old phrase, 'what goes around comes around'. I wonder how much it costs to rent 'views' and 'subscribers' Maybe I can get my Cow Pie Bingo channel going?
Nice job Ian, out the violations of the youtube rules and let us see what they do about it. Oh, they do nothing. Policing your web site costs money. Lots of money.
Tony wrote "(Scientology loves to prey on chiropractors.)". Grifters make the best prey?