“Scams will multiply”: before the release of GTA VI, scams are skyrocketing

Three weeks before its release, hackers are taking advantage of the excitement around the new Grand Theft Auto (GTA) to increase the number of scams, and that is not likely to slow down, warns Luis Corrons, cybersecurity expert: "We fear that the situation will intensify. There is a good chance that we will observe many more scams during the week preceding the release of GTA VI."

This is not the first wave of video game scams to spread on the web. Already in June, when GTA VI pre-orders opened, fake PlayStation Stores had been created. While it is not possible to know the exact number of victims of these deceptions, because not everyone reports them to the police, it is certain that many unfortunate people fall into the trap.

Last month, researchers from Avast, a cybersecurity company, spotted more than 200 domain names linked to GTA in 24 hours. Of these websites, 10% were classified as high or medium risk.

"On these malicious sites, we have noticed that criminals create sites that look like legitimate video game stores or use the familiar visual codes of GTA, explains Luis Corrons. They promote pre-orders, free downloads, exclusive content or competitions. The objective is always the same: to convince visitors to enter their personal information, their game identifiers or their banking details, in order to steal them" explains the expert.

Pay attention to your credit card

In most cases, "the scams aim to steal money from users by recovering their bank details", specifies Luis Corrons. When users enter them thinking they are pre-ordering GTA VI, they are stolen and used to make other online purchases.

To understand how this deception works, Avast researchers played the game to the end. They used "canary cards". These do not contain money, but function like traditional bank cards and therefore allow you to see when an external purchase is made.

Other fraudulent sites rely on cryptocurrencies. This is for example the case of the fangta6.com site, still active, which surfs on the image and universe of the famous video game. The idea is this: spin a wheel to determine the maximum amount of USDC, a cryptocurrency, that users can spend to invest in a hypothetical future GTA-inspired token.

Scam signals