Scammers extorting money from developers by impersonating Riot Games and other big studios
Young developers who tried to get jobs at Riot Games, Rockstar, and Manticore Games fell victim to an unknown group of scammers. The impostors presented themselves as recruiters, showing devs what looked like authentic paperwork, to extort money from them.
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Polygon spoke with a few developers who wanted to get a dream job at Riot Games but were eventually scammed. Here are the key takeaways from the article.
- Scammers contact some applicants directly, while other people apply for fake job listings on Indeed (a company representative said that it goes to extraordinary lengths to remove such postings).
- Then scammers make brief interviews with applicants via email, Discord, or another chat platform. According to the victims, the whole process seemed real as the Discord account, for example, had the name of a real Riot recruiter.
- The next stage of this scheme is a job offer, which is sent to applicants. These contracts seemed authentic as they had the Riot Games logo and were signed by a chief HR officer. After that, applicants are asked to pay for work equipment, which could be Apple iPad Pro or another expensive device.
- As some victims were young and newly graduated, they were unsure about the hiring process during the pandemic, so they would send money and give banking information to scammers.
- Polygon spoke with at least one applicant who lost money, while five others stopped speaking to scammers once they asked to pay them.
“80% or more of what’s fueling this problem is that you don’t have a physical office location to visit and say, ‘Oh, I can see the logo of the game company, and I can see the employees walking around,’” Riot Games lawyer Dan Nabel said. “When it’s all done remotely, it makes people more susceptible to this kind of predatory behavior, unfortunately.”
Once the Riot Games found out about the scheme, it decided to file a lawsuit against these impostors. The company is now trying to find more information about the scammers.
