Fortnite: Criminals Are Laundering Money Through Buying And Selling V-Bucks

Fortnite is currently PUBG’s biggest rival in India. However, in the UK and US, Fortnite has already surpassed PUBG. Aware of such a gold mine, hackers are using the virtual currency used in this game to launder some black money.

Fortnite chose V-Bucks as its in-game currency. While the game is free, players have to buy V-Buck with cash if they want to buy aesthetic bonuses such as character emotes, skins, and exclusive designs for their vehicles. Not only can players buy V-Bucks for themselves, but they can also give others. And that’s how criminals start their business.

The Independent and cybersecurity company Sixgill worked together to investigate into laundering money in Fortnite, revealing shocking findings. Scammers steal credit cards information, use that to purchase V-Bucks, then sell those bucks at discounted rates to whitewash the stolen money. The sale of most of such V-Bucks takes place on the Dark Web while the rest are sold via social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The Dark Web is a hidden part of the Internet which is an ideal place for illegal trades. Furthermore, since buyers pay with Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash, it’s almost impossible to track them or the sellers down.

According to Sixgill, the racket was discovered when they pretended to be interested buyers. The company cannot estimate the profit these scammers make, but they did find out $250,000 (nearly Rs 178 lakh) earned on eBay from Fortnite items with two months. Notably, the number of mentions of Fortnite has rocketed on the Dark Web lately.

Benjamin Preminger, a senior intelligence analyst at Sixgill, told the Independent that criminals are laundering money in and out of the game’s system and escaping with it. Preminger added that Epic Game shows no care about illegal activities as long as their currency is still flowing on the platform.

Later responding to the report, Epic Game said it “takes these issues seriously.” However, apart from telling users to use two-factor authentication for their accounts and not to reuse passwords, the developer doesn’t seem to have any plans to tackle this problem.

With 2018 profit of $3 billion, you must be asking yourself how much of that money was stolen.