The FBI has issued a public service announcement (PSA) warning the public of the use of play-to-earn games as part of a scheme to defraud users of funds stored in the form of cryptocurrency. Criminals are enticing victims to partake in these kinds of games and then using malware to extract the funds from wallets linked to the game, according to the bureau.
FBI Alerts on Play to Earn Games Crypto Fraud
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a PSA warning the public about the use of play-to-earn games in schemes intended to steal funds from unsuspecting users. On March 9, the institution released a PSA on this, detailing how criminals are luring users to invest funds into play-to-earn games.
As per the PSA, criminals set up a relationship with selected victims in order to gain their trust. After that, they persuade them to participate in online play-to-earn games that offer rewards for their actions, and to deposit funds into a cryptocurrency wallet as a staking mechanism.
The rewards advertised are proportional to the number of funds stored in the cryptocurrency wallet, thus incentivizing users to put in more funds to get more rewards.
The games demonstrate phony rewards increasing in their cryptocurrency wallet, and so users are prompted to spend more funds to keep growing their rewards. However, when they try to withdraw these rewards, criminals will empty out their wallets of the deposited cryptocurrency, asking for more funds to help recover the stolen crypto, as a final theft against the targeted victim.
How to Avoid Becoming a Victim
In the PSA, the FBI also provides a series of recommendations to avoid becoming a victim of criminals using this kind of scheme. The first one is to segregate funds, as the bureau recommends keeping other funds separate from a gaming wallet, which should be created only for gaming purposes; this minimizes the effect of suffering a wallet drain.
Another suggestion is to check their purported gains using a third-party block explorer, to make sure that these are real and are actually being received in the wallet of whatever cryptocurrency is being used. The final recommendation is to check which sites have access to funds in their cryptocurrency wallets, and to revoke these accesses on a regular basis to avoid loss of funds from unknown contracts.
The FBI issued several PSAs last year, including a pig butchering scam alert in December, and another one related to decentralized finance in August.
What do you think of the most recent FBI warning on schemes using play to earn games? Let us know in the comments section below.
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