New Scam Steals Steam Accounts, Baiting With Free Discord Nitro
Bad actors are abusing the Discord voice chat and instant messaging platform once again. In a new campaign being conducted over Discord, hackers are luring gamers - arguably the better part of Discord's population - into giving away their gaming account credentials.
The bait used in this new scam is a free period of Discord Nitro. Nitro is Discord's premium, paid subscription service that gives a significant number of new features and perks to subscribers.
The scammers are using a simple trick that works surprisingly well on gamers. The scam asks the Discord user to link their Discord and Steam accounts in order to receive the free Nitro subscription.
In the year 2021, anyone who uses multiple platforms is used to linking various accounts. This can be a completely legitimate process and a lot of gaming platform clients support cross-platform account linking or linking a gaming account to a social media profile. This makes it particularly easy to convince a gamer on Discord to click a fake link promising free nitro, then enter their account's Steam credentials in the phishing page that shows up.
The bad actors running the ongoing scam have set up a number of domains containing spoofed Discord pages that all have believable URLs such as discord-appnitro dot com and appnitro-discord dot com. One of the domains even attempts to spoof the name of popular Danish e-sports organization Astralis, best known for the Counter-Strike competitive team they manage - a name that is certain to be familiar to a huge portion of gamers.
However, there is a big issue with how this scam is conducted. All the links to the sites spoofing Discord pages associated with the fake "link your Steam account" Nitro promotion all originate from unknown senders. Those are Discord bot accounts that will not be on anyone's friend list. As a general rule of thumb, accepting messages from complete strangers, especially when they are promising you free stuff and sending you links to click is a terrible idea.
Gamer accounts are a surprisingly lucrative target for hackers and scammers because they are relatively easy to take over and are just as easy to sell online for considerable sums of money, especially if the account has a large collection of re-sellable virtual items.
