In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the battle royale mode Warzone, accounts of hackers have been taken over. To get their player accounts back, they demand large sums in bitcoins.
What happened? According to a report from Vice, there are currently increasing cases where hackers are hijacking the accounts of Call of Duty players. Since these accounts often have many hours of invested playtime and a lot of earned skins and achievements, these accounts are quite valuable to their users.
Thus, hackers are said to write clear ransom letters to them via Twitter and other platforms. They demand a certain amount in bitcoins, otherwise the account would be lost. According to Vice, one such ransom letter reportedly looked like this:
If you would like our help in preventing data leaks, bank accounts, etc., and in recovering your [CoD] account, please send $400 to the following address.
Up to $2,600 for a CoD account?
What are the hackers demanding? The bitcoins are said to be sent to a specific link, according to Vice. It is said that this link has already received 1.2 bitcoins, which amount to approximately $12,000. However, it is unclear whether all this money comes from the extortion of CoD players.
Individual payments are said to range from $20 to $2,600. However, it is not proven that such a high amount has actually been paid for a CoD account.
How do the hackers access the accounts? The exact method of the hackers is unknown. According to the report, some of the victims are said to have used the same password for multiple site logins.
This is, of course, a feast for hackers, who only need to hack one account to then gain access to many other accounts of the user with the same password.
What is Activision doing? The affected players have reached out to Activision’s customer service in their distress. However, according to the user osandy23 (via Vice), this has not helped:
One day I started CoD and my account was logged out, and I couldn’t log in with my credentials, so I created a new account because I couldn’t reach Activision support, which I am very upset about.
osandy23 via Vice
Another user named GOHGAMER also complains about support:
This time I contacted Activision support via chat, and they had no records of my support request that I submitted 10 hours ago, even though I provided them the reference number in the email.
GOHGAMER via Vice
This slowness and low efficiency of customer service is certainly also due to the fact that there are at least 75 million players in CoD who regularly submit various requests to support. However, it has long been known that there is a flourishing hacker underground where illegally obtained accounts are traded for a lot of money.
Especially Fortnite has often been mentioned here, as supposedly hacking kids and teenagers make a small fortune by stealing mass accounts and selling them for money.
