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Fortnite is Being used as a Money Laundering Venue

Raevenlord

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The Independent has conducted an investigative report into the underwold's usage of Fortnite as a venue for money laundering. This likely won't come as a surprise - Fortnite has pretty lax acquisition restrictions for its in-game content and V-bucks, and the world's most popular multiplayer game moves millions of players through its servers daily. with such a deep pool of likely buyers for anything Fortnite at under Fortnite-store pricing, the stage is set for an almost untraceable money laundering scheme.





The Independent partnered with cybersecurity research company Sixgill in their investigative report, and the company found that usage of stolen credit cards to acquire bulk content in the Fortnite store was a relatively effortless way for criminals to get their hands on valuable digital goods, which they then resell either via Ebay (Sixgill found that Fortnite items grossed more than $250,000 on eBay in a 60 day period last year) or social media. That most of these users are only accepting cryptocurrency as means of payment is telling, in that it becomes just that much harder for law enforcement to keep up with the money trail.



This is a global phenomenon - Sixgill employees posed as potential buyers and found a network that deals in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and English. And research conducted separately by IT security firm Zerofox found 53,000 different instances of online scams relating to Fortnite between early September and early October - with an estimated 86 per cent of those scams having been shared via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Epic games, of course, made some $3bn profit in 2018 with Fortnite - all via microtransactions. Let's just say that in the face of increased profits, any serious action to mitigate the chances of this happening likely aren't at the top of the priority list.

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Ridiculous "report" 250k in 2 months? hardly crime of the century and that figure doesn't show what % of those transactions were in fact legal.... but show me any game with digital currency and assets that can be bought and sold on ebay or social media that doesn't have any dodgy russian or chinese sellers that take crypto. I'm sure a lot of legit sellers would also sell for crypto cause it's so easy these days for buyers to buy $100's worth of digital assets then claim to ebay and paypal they never received the goods and the seller has been left out of pocket due to fraudulent charge backs.
 
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What a revelation. What about all the streamers getting generous "donations", if that's not money laundering I don't know what is.
 
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What a revelation. What about all the streamers getting generous "donations", if that's not money laundering I don't know what is.

Can you explain in more details how someone would launder money through donations on twitch for example?
 
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250k is peanuts. The Independent wasted a monumental amount of time on this.

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250k is peanuts. The Independent wasted a monumental amount of time on this

Yea but they will find a way to write off the costs, as ALL big companies do 24/7/365.

If you are surprised by this, then please contact me asap, as I am selling some prime beachfront property in Arkansas and WV...... :D
 
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LMAO This is news how? The FBI and RCMP have both stated that there is HUGE amounts of money laundering through online games. Started with Everquest...
 
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Can you explain in more details how someone would launder money through donations on twitch for example?
No oversight over transactions, multiple $20-100 donationas to multiple twitch streamers would easily launder thausands of dollars per day. I mean can't you read this article regarding Fortnite money laundering? Why not do the same scheme on Twitch and other micro-transaction platforms?
 

INSTG8R

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Actually the only reason I have an Epic Account is because some nice Russian Fellow tried to spoof my email to create I’ll assume a Fortnite acccount so I happily just took it over so while I’m definitely not a fan of the Epic Launcher it did make getting the freebie games they’ve been offering.
 
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