In addition to the bogus items, which ranged from outright scams to meme and joke items, there were also clear indications of the game’s more malevolent nature.Ī user posted a screenshot of a Malwarebytes scan on the game’s discussion forums, as seen in SidAlpha’s video, flagging one of the game’s executables as a threat. For instance, the player on the Team Fortress 2 forums spotted a rare rocket launcher with an identical thumbnail and description as the official TF2 item it was only upon paying $100 for the rocket that he noticed it was attached to a different game. SidAlpha - the same YouTuber who published the Silicon Echo reveal - discussed how the Steam Marketplace was suddenly populated with items from Abstractism, which closely resembled rare items from other games. But YouTuber SidAlpha noticed that something was afoot, when someone on the Team Fortress 2 forums posted about how the game was tied into an item scam. When Abstractism was up on the store, it was marketed as a “relaxing” platformer with a simple design. But not long after these accusations started circulating, it has been taken off Steam. The game is called Abstractism, which was said to not only infiltrate players’ computers with mining software, but also dupe them through falsified items on the Steam Marketplace.
The latest title to come under fire, however, reportedly had a more nefarious scheme in mind: turning players’ computers into cryptocurrency miners. Last September, Valve removed almost 200 “fake” games from Silicon Echo Studios - cheaply made games that developers made to cut a quick profit by taking advantage of the Steam Direct program and the trading card system. There’s been an unfortunate increase in the amount of illegitimate games on Steam.