Fortnite was definitely one of the top hits of 2018. The game has millions of players and it attracted a loyal fanbase. Surprisingly enough, this might not be all that it attracted. According to an Independent report, the game also became a tool for money laundering.
Yes, you heard that right. Some people use V-Bucks, the Fortnite currency to “clean” money. How do they do that? They use stolen credit cards to buy those V-Bucks and then they are transferred to players at a discount rate.
“Criminals are executing carding fraud and getting money in and out of the Fortnite system with relative impunity,” said Benjamin Preminger, a senior intelligence analyst at Sixgill to the Independent.
Where does this happen?
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the Dark Web is the home to Fortnite money laundering. If you don’t know already, the Dark Web contains the hidden Internet side, and it is ideal for illegal activity.
In order to make this discovery, agents from Sixgill pretended to be customers. It was discovered that these operations happen all around the world, from the United States, to China and Russia.
“Threat actors [a malicious person or entity] are scoffing at Epic Games’ weak security measures, saying that the company doesn’t seem to care about players defrauding the system and purchasing discounted V-Bucks…This directly touches on the ability of threat actors to launder money through the game,” added Preminger.
Epic Games was also criticized for not doing enough in order to prevent criminal activity. For example, it appears that the game attracts around 50,000 online scams per month. More than that, the numbers are growing and this is turning into a big business. At the moment Epic Games hasn’t commented the report and we shall see if they have anything to say.
Nora Reynolds is a major in biology and a minor in Biological Basis of Behavior, writing about science in general. She also likes to try new gadgets and sports about the AI new era.