FIFA 22's FUT Targeted by Hackers; Streamers Lost Fortune
What do you need to clean the account of a leading FIFA Ultimate Team card trader? Judging by recent hacks, apparently only the player tag.
- The greatest collectors of FIFA Ultimate Team cards in FIFA 22 have become the target of a hacker attack;
- The thieves were able to gain access using only player tags and wiped accounts clean of cards and FIFA points;
- Electronic Arts has assured that it has launched an investigation into the matter, but the affected users are outraged at how easily their accounts were hacked.
Ultimate Team modes in sports games are a golden egg-laying goose for Electronic Arts, and while formally cards from virtual packs can't be traded (and have nothing to do with gambling at all), in practice collections of rare specimens are worth a lot of money. Apparently it tempted some hackers, who recently took over and cleaned out the accounts of many FIFA Ultimate Team streamers and traders.
Among those targeted by the thieves were FUT Donkey, JoaoSeleiro, Bateson87, FutGameBreakerZ, CP7, FG, and NoahHD. The lost collections of just these seven players were valued by Internet user BaggedFut at almost 100 thousand dollars. Of course, not all victims had comparable virtual "wealth", but it is possible that the hackers could have cleaned out accounts with cards worth several hundred thousand dollars in total.
If your first suspicion as to the cause of the incidents was the hacking of EA's servers, we will probably disappoint you. Everything indicates that hackers took advantage of... the incompetence of EA Help employees. According to, among others, FUT Donkey (so far the "richest" FUT collector in FIFA 22), the thieves simply tracked down player tags or the PlayStation Network and contacted Help for allegedly lost account access.
In theory, this shouldn't be enough to take over an account, even if the hacker sends a whole bunch of requests to the help desk (as evidenced by the flurry of EA Help notifications in Donkey's FUT email inbox that appeared before the successful hack). Especially when two-step login verification is enabled, and the account owner has twice asked for adding information that he's being targeted by hackers, and for EA not to change any data. But apparently, sooner or later, the ball landed the court of an employee who didn't care about following protocols.
Thus, the hacker was given access to the account (and in some cases, the "old" email address) and was able to wipe it clean of virtual cards and currency. However, this is not the worst part. After all, the account contained private user data, "thanks" to which FUT Donkey soon received information about logins from his email to various websites, from IMDb to porn sites.
It's not hard to guess that FUT Donkey and the rest of the victims are, to put it mildly, furious at Electronic Arts' indiscretion. The former even wonders if the incident is the result of not so much incompetence, but deliberate support of the intruder by someone employed at EA Help. After all, we've already had a case where a company employee sold FUT cards for money, despite the publisher's official condemnation of the practice.
Others suspect that the hackers used data stolen from Electronic Arts' servers last summer. There are also those who believe that this is nothing new, because similar actions have already happened to users of previous installments of FIFA.
Regardless of how these thefts were carried out, the FUT community is not thrilled with EA's lack of communication. The company announced (via Eurogamer) that an investigation has been launched and referred players to a dedicated page on how to protect their account from theft. The latter was seen by the victims as alleged evidence of Electronic Arts' dismissive attitude towards the whole matter.
Streamers' mood is not improved by the problems with regaining access to their profiles. It seems that EA - in accordance with the old behavior pattern planned for such situations - suddenly became very vigilant and will not give back accounts even after providing phone numbers, dates of birth, answers to security questions, etc. Despite the fact that previously it didn't need any "keys" to hand over control of the account, which was bluntly summarized by bateson87 on Twitter:
"Its like i've locked all my work tools to do my job in my work van. Only for the van company to go ahead and hand the keys to a random person on the street without informing me."
That is why a petition on Change.org was launched, urging Electronic Arts to seriously investigate the issue of hacking and make changes in customer service. So far, nearly 3,000 people have signed it, but the number is growing rapidly. Others, including FUT Donkey, intend to take legal action.
