The Abstractism platformer, which could be purchased on Steam, installed Trojans on players’ computers and used them for mining cryptocurrencies. Perhaps it was all some kind of subtle trolling.
The game from Okalo Union studio has been in store since March 2018. The developers themselves described the game as “an absolutely trivial platformer.” The gameplay was appropriate – the player had to move the cube from one point to another on black and white levels. The gameplay looked like this:
Gamers who have installed Abstractism began to notice that such a simple game overloads the system and requires incredibly many resources. Finally, someone checked the game on an antivirus and found out that the file steam.exe – it’s a Trojan in disguise.
The developers themselves also behaved frankly strangely. They recommended gamers to run the game and leave it on for the whole day, promising that this will increase the chance of loot loss.
And the loot of the game in the Steam store was clearly copied from other titles. Here, for example, is an in-game item that copies a bazooka from Team Fortress 2. The original costs $ 100, and this version is very cheap, and an inexperienced gamer could simply not notice the trick and buy a fake:
Other in-game products were so specific that we don’t even know how to comment on them:
The developers denied the mining charges, claiming that the players simply launched Abstractism on “high graphics settings”. However, one of the messages, which was subsequently edited, contained the following statement: “Bitcoin is outdated, we are now using Abstractism to mine the Monero cryptocurrency.”
Steam has already responded to player complaints and removed the game from the store. However, this is not the first case when dubious projects appear in the store after Valve’s refusal to strictly moderate content.
In May, the Climber game was released, which, like Abstractism, added a copy of an expensive item to the Steam Store – this time a rare Dragonclaw Hook from DOTA 2 was forged. Climber has also been removed now.
Also on the topic:
- In the first quarter of 2018, mobile game developers lost $103 million due to fraud
- Scammers launder money through Clash of Clans. WHAT?!
A source: Kromtech Security