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PSA: Don’t Give Your Xbox Login to Sketchy Instagram Accounts

A phony EA Sports Instagram account has lots of red flags -- and nearly 9,000 followers.

by Eric Johnson
Shutterstock

With World Cup fever in full swing, EA is expecting buzz from the event to drive players back into its hit FIFA soccer game series. It’s also touting FIFA Ultimate Team, an online companion service that lets players build their own fantasy sports-style teams for use in the game.

One thing it’s not doing to promote FIFA Ultimate Team, however: Exchanging exclusive bonus content for login credentials on Instagram.

A fake EA Sports Instagram account, flagged today by security company Malwarebytes, has been posting photos since April promising Ultimate Team players and FIFA Points to followers who visit its website. But the site is simply a slapped-together grid of text fields requesting email addresses, passwords and the like for Xbox Live and EA’s own PC gaming store, Origin.

And, of course, many of those accounts are connected to users’ credit cards and other personal info. Yikes.

Despite the website’s sketchiness, the phishing scheme seems to have ensnared a decent number of FIFA players, with 8,772 followers on the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app. Malwarebytes’ Christopher Boyd said via email that the Instagram posts “typically have a minimum of 400+ likes with multiple users posting that they’re visiting the linked URL to enter their details.”

An EA spokesperson told Re/code that the fake Instagram account has been suspended. However, it is still possible to find it on the photo-sharing service, along with an active link to the phishing website. I’m leaving the link out of this story, for obvious reasons.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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