Videogame Hackers Are Stealing Players’ Accounts and Loot During Pandemic
Online gaming has surged—and so has fraud—as children play more during the coronavirus crisis


After his high school switched to remote learning last spring, Luke Martin had a lot of extra time on his hands. He filled his idle hours playing videogames. Then he got hacked.

One day in April when he tried logging into the online gaming platform Steam, he received a message saying his credentials were incorrect. After Steam’s customer-service desk helped him get back into his account, he discovered that $200 of games he had purchased had vanished. Even the $1.10 he had remaining in his account was gone. He checked the login history and found that someone had been signing into his account from an IP address in Moldova.

The quarantine-induced surge in gaming last spring, especially among children, has brought with it a surge in fraudsters looking for opportunity. Online gaming traffic rose 30% in the second quarter compared with the first, and attempts to hack into players’ accounts and steal their digital goods rose, too, according to Kevin Gosschalk, chief executive of Arkose Labs, a fraud-and-abuse prevention company for gaming merchants and other retailers.

While you might not consider a videogame hack to be as devastating as a bank-account breach, let alone a home burglary, victims do lose personal property and funds as a result. Digital currency and items ranging from weapons to “skins,” the outfits worn by players’ avatars, can be worth a lot to hackers who sell them in online marketplaces.

Account logins, often using stolen passwords, are the most common method of attack, according to Arkose. If you reuse your passwords in multiple sites and one gets breached, that password might end up on a list that hackers buy on the black market. They try those exposed passwords and associated usernames on other sites, hoping to get lucky.Out of roughly two billion videogame login attempts in April, May and June, 31% were fraudulent—up from 11% in the prior year period, the report said. Game giant Nintendo NTDOY -6.27% reported at least 300,000 of its world-wide users’ accounts had been hacked since April, and the company added additional security measures in response....