From in-game skin thefts to elaborate fake gambling sites made solely for the purpose of phishing, scammers seem to be upgrading every day as they keep finding new ways to rob people of their money. The scamming problem has been prevalent in online gaming ever since in-game cosmetics have started to exist. While gaming platforms like Steam actively try to keep scammers off their service, a lot of them still go unchecked. There are countless posts springing up each day on the Steam forums of people complaining about their in-game items or skins being lost to scammers.
The scams aren’t limited to Steam either, streaming platforms like Twitch also see hundreds of scammers trying to scam unsuspecting viewers on a daily basis. Games like CSGO, Dota 2 or League of Legends are especially targeted by these fraudsters on Twitch due to their huge popularity among the plethora of multiplayer titles.
Jake “Stewie2k” Yip – a professional CSGO player – recently tweeted out his frustration when he encountered one such scammer who not only impersonated him, but even faked his retirement from the professional scene.
“It’s getting pretty ridiculous @TwitchSupport”, he tweeted after attaching a picture of his fake retirement on the scammer’s channel. He wanted to get the impersonator banned, as he humorously said, “Give me power for the ban hammer. I’ll handle it” followed by an angry pouting face.
The attached pic included a post from the fraudster which said, “Sadly I have to bring you some sad news, in the next week I will be quitting CS:GO and live-streaming. I have had some new opportunities come up in life which will not allow me to carry on with this path in life anymore. To give back to the community, I will be giving away all my CS:GO skins… You can enter this giveaway by competing a roll to win your prize!” The post was attached with a link to the giveaway which, needless to say, is a phishing link.
How does the scam work?
The scam relies on viewers clicking the fake giveaway link attached with the post. The unsuspecting victim would then be asked to fill in his account credentials to participate in the giveaway (or claim the prize). The credentials are then sent to the scammer instead and the password is quickly changed by a bot, or in some cases an API is generated on steam to disrupt any future trades made by the user.
These sorts of scam aren’t new on Twitch, the Dota 2 section also witnesses fake streamers of professionals regularly. While Twitch is usually swift to hand out bans to these impersonators, they’re only a few clicks away from opening another account on the live-streaming platform.
