While Steam was busy removing NSFW games nobody noticed the verified one that was stealing crypto from everybody

You constantly get told you need to be careful what you download from the internet, and while that is true, you should not be blamed for being less than usually vigilant when you download a verified game from a public-facing digital games storefront such as Steam.

Well, you would think so at least, but if you stop and think for a minute, it’s not like Steam has a desk full of people checking every upload of the 1,000s of random games and other crap that gets uploaded each week.

We have seen crypto scams before on Discord, but should you be surprised when it turns out that at least one game nobody has ever heard of turns out to be riddled with malware? In this particular case, a cryptodrainer empties your crypto out of your account and directly transfers it to that of a bad actor.

Now, if you are dealing with decent amounts of crypto, it’s a good practice to keep it stored on a handy hardware wallet rather than just being able to be sucked off into the ether by BlockBlasters, a 2D platform game that, according to Bleeping Computer, was available on Steam for two months.

For most of that period, the game was safe, but on the 30th of August, a cryptodrainer was added in an update, and the rest is rather unsavory history.

Streamer Raivo Plavnieks, who has stage 4 high-grade sarcoma, had been raising money for life-saving treatment when he was hit.

“For anybody wondering what is going on with $CANCER live stream… my life was saved for the whole 24 hours until someone tuned in my stream and got me to download the verified game on Steam,” he said.

The Latvian lost more than $32,000, and it appears the game, which was published by Genesis Interactive and has since been removed from Steam, hoovered up some $150k from various crypto wallets during its illicit time in the wild.

It seems that people on X talking about a significant amount of crypto may have been targeted to try out the game in an elaborate scam.

You might think that if such a thing happened, there would be the chance of some recompense from where you actually purchased the game. However, you did read all those terms and conditions when you opened your account, didn’t you? You didn’t just click on Accept….