Posted on March 15, 2018 at 5:49 AM
Hacked Fortnite Accounts Cost Players Big
Players of the Epic Games’ Fortnite are reporting suspicious charges, fraudulent activity. Epic seems to be mishandling some cases while saying that they are working on a fix. No detail is given about how this is happening, or what fix is being pursued.
Beef Up Account Security
Fortnite players are advised to enable a two-factor authentication on their accounts, following reports of stolen funds from players’ linked PayPal and credit card accounts. Reports of hacked accounts have been growing for a month, but Epic Games still has no explanation for how this has happened. Users have chronicled their accounts on Reddit when nothing has been done to solve the issues of theft and fraudulent charges. Epic maintains that the best course of action when a suspicious charge is made to an account is to contact player support.
Player (not) Support
In at least two instances, player support has not done enough. One teenaged player of Fortnite says that his mother’s credit card was charged nearly $1000 USD. Hackers completely emptied the account with fraudulent purchases. The user mentioned this in a Reddit thread, where Epic reached out to him for a direct message. After the user got in touch with player support, he later updated the Reddit thread to let followers know that player support had stopped corresponding with him altogether.
A second Redditor reports that he saw two unauthorized purchases on his PayPal account after purchasing the Season 3 Battle Pass. The user received a receipt for $74.99 and a receipt for $99.99, neither of which corresponded to a valid purchase. When they took the claim to PayPal in pursuit of a refund, the case was closed due to insufficient evidence to process a return. After the case was closed, the user was simply emailed copies of the receipts. According to the user, parts of the receipt were in Russian, though he, and the purchases, are from the US. He has submitted a ticket with Epic’s player support to no avail.
A community of complaints
The Fortnite forum is also rife with complaints about the similar activity. Although the company line seems to be to contact player support, Epic doesn’t seem to be doing much to actively return defrauded funds to their players. If I were a player, I might go one step further than the recommended two-factor authentication, and decouple my account from any payment system until this problem is properly addressed.
