EA just gives crooks FIFA accounts from streamers

Prominent FIFA players report that their accounts have been hacked, but now it turns out that EA simply gave them away to savvy hackers.

Since this month, dozens of streamers and other prominent FIFA players have complained that their accounts have been hacked. Now admits Electronic Arts what is causing the whole drama: human error and social engineering. It comes down to EA simply gave the FIFA accounts to crooks, without the knowledge of the rightful owners of the accounts!

FIFA accounts stolen

Streamers usually play the Ultimate Team online FIFA mode and that involves quite a bit of money. Getting a good footballer is a huge advantage because of the pay-to-win mechanism. In addition, streamers need to have good teams to entertain viewers with good games.

That also makes the streamers a target for ‘hackers’, who now use fairly simple methods to FIFA FUT accounts have been robbed. The crooks contacted the EA help desk pretending to be the streamers. Then, with some convincing, the email addresses of the streamers were found. After this it was a matter of resetting the account, presumably via the cracked email addresses.

‘Random Guy Gets My Account’

Affected streamer Bateson described the incident on Twitter with a metaphor: “It’s like putting my tools for work in my work van. Then the van maker gave the keys to a random guy on the street without involving me.”

EA promises that FIFA accounts will be even more secure in the future and has apologized for the incident. In their own words, roughly 50 accounts have been affected. The publisher will also look at the support system and whether it can better respond to possible phishing, social engineering and hackers.