Children targeted in Roblox scam

Parents are being urged to keep an eye on the children's online gaming activity after a fake login scam was revealded to be affecting players of the popular game Roblux.

In the game, users can spend a currency called Robux to buy vitual items like skins or animations to to customise their avatar. The Robux are paid for using real currency, and costs can get quite steep, with some costing close to £200.

Roblox has roughly 144 million daily active users and around 380 million monthly active players, with 56% of all players being under the age of 16. Around 36.7 million users make monthly unique purchases on the platform.

Given the cost, it can be tempting to follow a link on somewhere like Youtube promising extra Robux, which then takes users to a fake site where you enter your login details - at this point it throws you to the legitimate Roblox site so there is no further suspicion, and the scammers have taken your login details which they can use to harvest a player's in-game currency and scrape or sell their personal data for other uses.

Research by NordVPN says over a seven day period, they discovered 200 addresses on the dark web offering ready-made phishing pages which could be used to defraud Roblox users.

The link for free Robux could come from YouTube as mentioned, but could also be placed on TikTok video, or in chats of Discord, the chat app used by gamers - like many scams, it could encourage users to act quickly so they do not conteplate the potential pitfalls.

If a Roblox player does lose their in-game currency, it is very unlikely that they will be able to get it back - the company behind the game says it is under "no obligation" to assist unless it is made to do so by law.

It says, “Roblox does not guarantee that an individual’s account will be restored to its previous state, or that Roblox will be able to recover lost virtual items or virtual currency”.

The advice for parents is to talk to children about scams.

“One of the simplest habits is to encourage children to open Roblox directly through the official app or website rather than logging in through links they are sent," Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN says.

"Two-factor authentication remains an important protection, but authentication codes and backup codes should be treated just like passwords and never handed over to somebody else.”

Source: The Guardian

Found us through a search engine? Click here to join our newsletter, or contact us and send your email and we will add you into our community. We do not share your information. You will get free, weekly updates on the latest scams to protect you and your family.