This news was supposed to go up yesterday, because I imagine some people might really want to know about it, but it kind of got lost in the shuffle. Nevertheless, it's here and it's fresh and it's a giant warning to be very careful about the official EA Sports support channel on Twitter.
Malwarebytes has up a blog post about the scammers who are using a fake EA Sports channel in an attempt to pilfer gamers out of their Origin account information.
As noted in the blog post...
“We’ve observed a Twitter feed claiming to be a support channel for all things EA Sport.“What tends to happen is someone sends a query to the official EA Sport account (@EASPORTSFIFA, note the verified symbol on the profile), at which point the one in question (@EAFlFAHELPUK) will interject into the conversation with a link to visit.“As it uses the same avatar as the official account, recipients may not notice they’ve been sidelined into an entirely different conversation.”
It's like when you're talking to a realtor about a house you want to buy and then you go to get into your car and follow the realtor to the property, but then another fake realtor jumps in between and says “Oh it's this way, I know a shortcut” and then you follow the fake realtor to the fake property and then they say “Sign here on the dotted line” and it turns out that you gave away your account info and bought a dirt patch instead. The moral of the story? Don't follow fake realtors; don't buy dirt patches.
You can see just how the fake EA Sports account – using a slightly different name from the official support – interjects itself into support conversations with the images below.
All that scamming.
According to the Malwarebyte report, the scammer has routed more than 288 clicks since April 2nd to a fake website that asks for your Origin account information. As indicated in the image below.
But it's not just fake support and account scamming going on with Origin. There are also some Steam scammers out there, too. However, the Steam scams are a bit more obvious and usually revolve around handing out "free" Steam codes if you participate in an endless survey, while at the same time giving out all your personal information.
An additional post on Malwarebytes warns about the fake free games and wallet coins.
As noted on the blog...
“The scam is pretty simple, setup a web site advertising a free copy of some game, then require the user to share a referral link with their friends to earn ‘points’ toward getting the free game.“Once they have enough referrals, the user will try to download the game and be directed to a download site, one that requires the completion of one or more surveys in order to download.”
You'll probably want to read through the whole article to fully understand how the scam works. It's pretty lengthy and also applies to those fake betas we usually warn you about. If you're unfamiliar with the scam, a quick read-through is definitely worth it.
As always, if something looks or seems fishy, hold your wallet!
