The FBI has arrested a 21-year-old Florida man alleged to have stolen roughly $220,000 of crypto currency using malware installed alongside games. And while the PC platform used to nab this catch isn’t explicitly specified, the infested games listed by the FBI were present on Steam until recently.
According to the indictment, the suspect is accused of running this cybercrime operation with several co-conspirators for around two years. During this time, they added malware to eight video games. When downloaded, these would scrape a victim’s PC of passwords, which were then used to access cryptocurrency wallets.
According to investigators assigned to this case, these games were promoted on social media by the group, and even used bots to target people identified as owning considerable amounts of crypto. The FBI found the suspect after linking stolen Bitcoin to giftcards, which were used to pay for UberEats for the most part. That’s a lot of burgers.
The games used to infect computers with Malware include Lunara, PirateFi, BlockBlasters, and Lampy (the latter was infected with malware after an update). These games were taken off Steam earlier this year, when the FBI announced it was investigating the distribution of malware on the platform.
With an ever-growing number of games released to digital platforms by smaller creators every year, and software such as generative AI being used to create playable games at an astounding rate, one has to wonder if this sort of problem will only become more common in the future. Here’s hoping this FBI indictment will dissuade like-minded ne’er-do-wells, while encouraging platform owners like Valve to create the tools needed to stop it.
