Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: cybersecurity, epic games, Fortnite, Fortnite: Battle Royale

Several Fortnite Players have Reported Stolen Accounts Racking Up Huge Bills

Several Fortnite players have reported to Kotaku that their account information has been stolen and used to rack up some impressively hefty bills. The fraudulent charges have reached upwards of a hundred dollars, which is a pretty impressive amount of microtransactions.

Epic Games, while aware of the problem, is still working to resolve the issues which stem from pretty well-known exploits. Cybersecurity is just a fact of life these days, and not even gaming is immune to hackers. Especially with the prevalence of micro-transactions in games. Gaming accounts are becoming targeted more and more often.

So, Epic probably should have had them covered before this. That said, they are refunding any fraudulent purchases and are working on a fix.

As Kotaku reports:

Tyler, who plays Fortnite Battle Royale, says he received a text message from a gaming friend last week asking if he'd purchased the Fortnite base game, Save the World. "He saw my account online in that game mode," Tyler told me. But Tyler had not purchased Save the World or logged in for the last 24 hours. Shortly after the text, Tyler received e-mail receipts for purchases of $149.99 and $99.99. He said that his account password had not changed, so he has no idea how hackers took control of his account. However, his card data was saved in his Epic Games profile. Tyler received refunds afterward, according to screenshots seen by Kotaku.

Over the last few weeks, dozens of other players have complained on Reddit and on Epic Games' forums that their accounts have been compromised, too. One says they haven't played Fortnite Save the World in four months, but were charged $210 for two purchases. Some purchases were for Epic Games' V-Bucks, in-game currency. Others were for expansions, cosmetics or the Fortnite Save the World base game. Descriptions for several purchases were in Russian and read, "improvement from the standard," "Founder's Set" and "improved set."

If you're worried about your account security, or fear your information may have been compromised, now is the time to go change your passwords and enable two-factor authentication for your Epic account log-in. Make sure your Epic password is unique and not shared with any other account log-in, and you can also protect yourself by linking your social accounts. Linking your Google or Facebook accounts will give you access to your Epic account without needing to enter a separate password, which means you can absolutely gain access even once a hacker has changed your EG account passkey.

For further steps, you can see this handy guide posted by Epic Games.

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