Fortnite Scam Forces Players to Protect Themselves
Yesterday, we told you about a countdown that’s been appearing on television screens across the island. That countdown is set to end today and apparently, it’s going to climax with a one-time event that players will want to be logged in for. Today, we learned there is a little Fortnite V-Bucks scam going around and Epic Games took to their Twitter account to warn players. They also have been emailing players urging them to protect their accounts.
For those of you who don’t know V-Bucks is Fortnite’s in-game currency and if you have been playing Fortnite lately you’ll want to take some steps to protect yourself. Epic has provided ways to identify the scam. They have also told you what to do if you have fallen victim to it. Epic has stated:
“a number of accounts have recently been compromised using well-known hacking techniques. Epic Security is providing this bulletin to explain what’s happening and how to best secure your Epic account and other accounts.”
They go on to say:
“We’ve seen several instances of account theft and fraud related to websites that claim to provide you free V-Bucks or the ability to share or buy accounts. Please never share your Epic account details with anyone. Epic will never ask you for your password through email, social media, or a non-Epic website. Groups claiming to provide special Fortnite deals this way are fraudulent.”
Fortunately, Epic Games has shared with us a web service that lets you know if you are at risk or not:
“There is a fantastic web service (Have I Been Pwned) that will let you search your email address and determine if it has been part of any data breaches. If it has, you should assume that the password associated with that service is public knowledge and change all accounts that use it (not just your Epic account!) Even if your account information hasn’t been publicly identified as leaked, it’s possible that it may be leaked in the future, so there are steps that you can do to help protect yourself against that. You can start by signing up for the Have I Been Pwned notification service so you’re immediately alerted if your email is ever included in future dumps.”
“At Epic, we’ve been working hard to try to hunt down password dumps in order to proactively reset passwords for player accounts when we believe they are leaked online. While this approach involves a lot of manual work on our side, we believe that it prevents a significant amount of fraud. However, this approach doesn’t find every impacted account, or you might have created your Epic account after we checked a particular password dump. As a result, we’re working to further automate our process to check our account database against password dumps to close the gap on identifying impacted users and resetting their passwords. We’ve also enabled multi-factor authentication, which provides players with additional security options. The process to enable multi-factor authentication is described in greater detail further down in this article.”
To check out a full list of tricks and tips to help protect yourself, visit the full support site right here.
Have you been compromised? Tell us in the comments below.