Free to play games and scams have gone hand in hand since the very beginning of the model, and Fortnite is proving to be more different. Today, more and more YouTube videos promising easy ways to earn and receive V-Bucks, Fortnite’s in-game currency used to buy skins, weapons, and other enhancements are popping up everywhere.
While this is nothing new, the sheer popularity of Fortnite thanks to its accessible gameplay and low required specs suited to even the cheapest gaming laptops, especially among teenagers and even children, make these scams an even bigger concern as children are more likely to fall for the bogus claims found on YouTube. In most cases, these ads, found on hacked accounts that are often accounts abandoned my their owners, promise free V-bucks but really only want to gain access to users personal information.
With one quick search, you can find a host of these scams on YouTube, despite many claiming to have reported the accounts. You can even find these scams running in the YouTube ads, as well. This advertising can gain them even more views as the scammers attempt to get our personal information or the information of our children and especially as ads are becoming easier and easier to design thanks to advertisement design services from leading companies such as Adobe.
Still, YouTube claims to remove many scam ads found on the site. “We detect and remove millions of spam videos with YouTube machine learning algorithms systems and our teams continue to train these systems to adapt to new types of abuse, allowing us to tackle this content at scale,” a YouTube spokesperson told Polygon. “We use teams of highly trained content reviewers to determine whether videos violate our Community Guidelines.. We are committed to removing spam quickly, in many cases, preventing it from ever being viewed by users, while also making sure that we do not harm legitimate creators.”
But, despite these claims, the scam videos keep on coming, often filling up your search when you are looking for something related to Fortnite. Many believe that the scammers are finding ways to avoid the automated system, forcing YouTube to manually remove many of these ads as they successfully avoid their automated systems for getting rid of the videos. Still others believe it’s a lack of any real penalty when posting these ads, despite the fact that the scammers are actually trying to steal from unsuspecting people and even children.
Regardless of the underlying reason, the spam and scams surrounding Fortnite are definitely a major concern. While this isn’t the fault of YouTube or even the game’s creators, addressing the issue should be a major concern for both companies.
Remember, if you have children playing the game, teach them how to recognize these ads and explain to them why they should never give out personal information online. On top of that, monitor your children’s game and video time and ensure they aren’t trying any of these supposed tricks to get more V-Bucks.
If you don’t, you could find you lose more than a little time playing the game, as the scammers could steal more than just your V-bucks or your game, they could go as far as stealing money or personal information that could cause a great deal more damage.
