
Right. I'm off to live in a cave.
Players of games like Fortnite and Minecraft have emerged as juicy targets for cybercriminals. It might sound ridiculous, but stealing and reselling weapon skins, loot boxes and entire levelled-up accounts can bring in big money. Last year, a particular rifle skin in CS:GO went for 60,000 real American dollars. A Legacy …
For every game that has creds and loot boxes, there will be websites offering free creds if you click here and give us your usernames and passwords. Kids do it all the time, they might only do it once but there's a constant stream of new, fresh targets as kids come of age. What's annoying is these websites exist for years because like the article says, law enforcement isn't interested in virtual loot.
Not all crims are stupid. they know to look for low hanging fruit and if it's unguarded even better.
Gamers are juicy for them so it's not a surprise they're being targetted.
You can never get rid of criminals or crime all you can do is move it on away from you.
You have an alarm on your house not becasue it really make you any harder to break into, (who cares when a house alarm goes off?) but it makes the house next door without an alarm more appealing then yours.
Banks are hard to crack so they target gamers. Make the gamers harder to crack and they'll hit something else.
Not to mention that manner in which gamers are conditioned by the games themselves to be a kind of hacker. That is, the object in the games is something you keep hacking at. Hmmm... Seems worth of a sociological study. And, I wonder how this might have other long lasting effects to society.
Considering that contrary to the typical tens to hundreds of dollars in most games, the value stored in a Star Citizen account is usually from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, I'm glad I don't hear about this sort of thing happening all that often there. Though to be fair, they _do_ allow you to use two factor authentication, and even a successful hijack might see the ships transferred back to their original owner. Or maybe it's just _still_ too niche...
Fools and their money .... looks like the gamers dont need any help from the criminals to throw their money away.
just found this :
So the weapon that was sold, the Dragon Lore, was marked as such, featuring a sticker “signed” by Tyler “Skadoodle” Latham, who serves on the Cloud9 squad. They recently won the ELeague Major: Boston event, with Latham named the MVP. So, following that news, the skin rocketed up in price, and was sold to the unnamed buyer by a skin seller named Drone for the grand total of…wait for it…$61,052.63.
Whats a MVP?
wait , so they had a little competition, they let one (or more) of the winning team members have their name on a rifle skin (the only copy) and some idiot buys it (presumably off this Tyler) for 61k?
That's like buying a trophy with someone else's name on it!
must be kid with a very rich daddy
"That's like buying a trophy with someone else's name on it!"
Maybe more like sporting paraphernalia (footballs, shirts, what-have-you) signed by the person who scored the most goals/won/whatever. MVP is "most valuable player" - so the player who contributed the most to the win (most kills, goals, whatever).
I do think it's a ludicrous amount of money to spend on something like that, but then signed memorabilia isn't my thing.
I have this fabulous tulip bulb to sell you, for the mere cost of a house.
Value is perceptional.
Even the value of hard goods is subject to supply and demand, and virtual goods are no different, in truth, than a tulip bulb, a house, or a gold bar, or a bitcoin.
If a virtual object is hard to obtain, it will have value to somebody.
It has taken work to create, or skill to obtain, or luck to find, so it has value as a target for crime.
Not on the list, but there has been a recent increase in account stealing in LOTRO, via poisoned websites people are directed to from in-game messages offering free Lotro Points.
As above, account stealing/gutting has been going on for years; remember Sheldon losing his battle ostrich??
As long as their are lazy/greedy people, this scam will work.