The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States has warned that threat actors are now stealing millions of dollars in bitcoin by using phony prizes in so-called “play-to-earn” mobile and online games.
They do this by using custom-created gaming apps that promise massive financial rewards directly proportional to investments made to potential targets with whom they have already built confidence through protracted online talks, as per BleepingComputer.
‘Criminals contact victims online and build a relationship with victims over time. Criminals then introduce victims to an online or mobile game, in which players purportedly earn cryptocurrency rewards in exchange for some activity, such as growing ‘crops’ on an animated farm,” according to a new Public Service Announcement from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
Victims are told that in order to take part in these high-reward activities, they must buy cryptocurrency and set up a cryptocurrency wallet.
The report claimed that the fraudsters convince the victims that the stated prizes rise as the victim keeps more money in the wallet.
The scammers deplete the victims’ wallets by luring them with false prizes after the victims stop putting money.
The report also mentioned that these scammers will deceive their victims into believing they may get their money back by paying extra taxes or fees, but this is all a deception that will leave the victims broke.
Meanwhile, cybercriminals transmitted over 400,000 new malicious files every day to attack customers in 2022, representing a 5% increase over 2021, according to a new report.
Per the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, over 3,80,000 of these files were detected daily in 2021, and approximately 122 million malicious files were detected in 2022, an increase of 6 million from the previous year.
