Top FIFA Gamers Scammed in Phishing Campaign
It seems there is no such thing as stooping too low for hackers and fraudsters, as this latest story shows. In a new push to scam people out of their money and digital goods, a phishing attack left a number of the world's top-tier players of FIFA Ultimate Team robbed of their precious digital account belongings.
FIFA Ultimate Team is a product of the Electronic Arts company. The incident with the high-ranking players involved scammers using what Electronic Arts calls "phishing techniques".
Human Error to Blame
The game maker company blames the incident on human error in its official statement on the issue. According to EA, the hackers were able to "exploit human error within [the company's] customer experience team and bypass two-factor authentication". This allowed illegal access to the accounts of those high-ranking players.
While hacking into someone's game account may not seem like a very profitable thing to do, even for a desperate low-tier hacker, the reality of the current situation is very different. Digital goods, including various in-game items, stored inside a player's game account may be worth dizzying sums of money.
While there is no specific information on what sort of monetary worth of virtual items and player avatars the hacked accounts lost as a result of the attack, other comparable items in similar games that allow inter-player trading can reach hundreds of dollars apiece.
EA Vows to Re-train Support Staff
The situation with EA's online support must be pretty dire, given the "social engineering" tactics the scammers used, if you could even call them that. According to one of the affected players, the scammers simply spammed the EA player experience live chat, claiming they are one of the high-profile players and asking to have their account details changed. This goes on until "until some incompetent advisor finally gave them the account", one player said.
EA's response included the promise to re-train staff and educate them further on good security practices - something one would almost consider a requirement to get a job in a similar position in the first place.
