Fortnite V-Bucks Scam: Here's What You Need to Know

Fortnite blew up once it revealed to the world the free-to-play Battle Royale mode. Since then, the latest title from Epic Games has continued to just dominate the gaming community at record-breaking levels. With great popularity comes great risk, which has manifested once more in the form of a scam that is swiftly growing in frequency.

Epic Games took to their Twitter account to warn players about the frequently occurring scam regarding V-Bucks, the title's in-game currency. They've also been sending out emails to players, urging them to protect their accounts.

Additionally, they provided ways to identify the scam and what to do if a player has fallen victim to it. In their most recent update, they mentioned that "a number of accounts have recently been compromised using well-known hacking techniques. Epic Security is providing this bulletin to explain what's happening and how to best secure your Epic account and other accounts."

Some of the commonly known actions can flag down a scammer includes sharing passwords and falling victim to fake Fortnite offers, "We've seen several instances of account theft and fraud related to websites that claim to provide you free V-Bucks or the ability to share or buy accounts. Please never share your Epic account details with anyone. Epic will never ask you for your password through email, social media, or a non-Epic website. Groups claiming to provide special Fortnite deals this way are fraudulent."

Epic Games also provided a way to know if a player is at risk or not, as well as what they are doing on their end:

"There is a fantastic web service (Have I Been Pwned) that will let you search your email address and determine if it has been part of any data breaches. If it has, you should assume that the password associated with that service is public knowledge and change all accounts that use it (not just your Epic account!)

Even if your account information hasn't been publicly identified as leaked, it's possible that it may be leaked in the future, so there are steps that you can do to help protect yourself against that. You can start by signing up for the Have I Been Pwned notification service so you're immediately alerted if your email is ever included in future dumps."

"At Epic, we've been working hard to try to hunt down password dumps in order to proactively reset passwords for player accounts when we believe they are leaked online. While this approach involves a lot of manual work on our side, we believe that it prevents a significant amount of fraud. However, this approach doesn't find every impacted account, or you might have created your Epic account after we checked a particular password dump.

As a result, we're working to further automate our process to check our account database against password dumps to close the gap on identifying impacted users and resetting their passwords. We've also enabled multi-factor authentication, which provides players with additional security options. The process to enable multi-factor authentication is described in greater detail further down in this article."

Tips include using unique passwords, not sharing computers, up-to-date virus firmware, and more. To see the full list of tricks and tips to help protect yourself, visit the full support site right here. Until then, stay safe out there and be careful with whom you share your info!