EA can’t fool the FIFA 22 community – The hacking scandal is a disgrace

The FIFA community has expressed their dissatisfaction at EA’s response to the events of recent days, and Callum Dornan, Founder and Owner of SAF, has had his say on the FUT hacking scandal

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FIFA 22 is currently embroiled in a hacking scandal, with high-profile streamers and traders seeing their accounts getting taken over by hackers.

Mirror Football reported on Thursday that FIFA 22 players all over the world, including famous streamers and traders, are being targeted by hackers, with figures like Jamie Bateson (AKA Bateson87), NickRTFM, Trymacs, TisiSchubecH, FUT FG, FUT Donkey, JoaoSeleiro, narcoinsfc (Wael) and lNoahHDl all seeing their EA and FIFA 22 Ultimate Team accounts being taken over by hackers in recent weeks.

Following Mirror Football’s report and widespread media coverage from outlets like IGN, EuroGamer, Dexerto and more, EA released a statement on Friday morning confirming that the company are investigating, but the FIFA community were ultimately left disappointed by the response.

“We’ve been made aware of recent account takeover attempts and are currently investigating,” An EA Sports spokesperson told Mirror Football.

“More information on how to secure your account, including how to enable two-factor authentication, can be found here: https://help.ea.com/en/help/account/how-to-maintain-account-security/.”

And it’s easy to see why the FIFA community are disappointed by this response, because this is a very serious situation, and EA’s response wasn’t good enough. The events of the last few weeks and months have left a lot of players, who have spent a significant amount of money on both buying the game, and probably on in-game purchases too, with their personal information and personal accounts exposed to hackers.

In Mirror Football’s previous article, it was revealed in detail how hackers are able to take control of FIFA 22 Ultimate Team clubs and EA accounts.

They do this by spamming the EA Help live chat service, with the hackers appearing to be able to convince EA Help advisors to agree to change email accounts associated with EA accounts just by stating a Gamertag or PSN ID, without asking for additional verification, and even give out the current email associated with the account.

The FIFA 22 Ultimate Team in-game leaderboards, which show who the most successful traders are, are now essentially hit-lists for hackers, who only need the player’s Gamertag or PSN ID to attempt a hack at accounts. And with each day that goes by without a resolution of this issue, more and more players are at risk of having their information exposed by hackers, so forget TOTY, EA needs to make this issue an utmost priority, to protect their player’s data and personal information.

And as for EA including a line about enabling two-factor authentication, that’s obviously a very good way of protecting your account, but in this case, having two-factor authentication enabled on your account will not protect you from being hacked in this way, as Mirror Football detailed in a previous article.

It’s good news that EA has confirmed an investigation is underway into this issue, but additional security measures need to be introduced as soon as possible. For example, remove the option for someone to start a live chat on EA Help without signing in. This way, two-factor authentication can protect players’ accounts.

Mirror Football also spoke to Callum Dornan, Founder and Owner of SAF, an esports organisation that has professional FIFA 22 players on their roster and a huge FUT trading community, who revealed his thoughts on EA’s response to recent events.

“The hackings that we are seeing in the community have been going on for weeks, if not months,” said Callum Dornan, Founder and Owner of SAF.

“It’s been reported to EA on numerous occasions, with no response either publicly or through private channels, as we saw with the scandal last year, it took mainstream media to get involved, to get any sort of response from EA.

“Today’s response told us nothing, 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) has nothing to do with the hackings, people in the community want to know that the game they’ve spent both money and a considerable amount of time on, won’t be passed over to “hackers” because of some basic security issues at EA, and we didn’t get that today.

“Moving forward, we want guarantees that both our personal data AND gaming accounts are safe from being exploited, I fear this issue will be swept under the rug in a similar manner to how last years scandal involving EA Employees allegedly selling Icon Cards.”

FUT Donkey, a prominent FIFA 22 Ultimate Team trader, detailed how their account was hacked on social media on Thursday.

“Just got hacked boys, finally people can stop blaming me for the hacks,” Said FUT Donkey on Twitter.

“I plan to take legal action, they gave my account to a random person via the live chat.

“Was a fun ride, see u guys in 23 I guess.

“I told EA live chat 2 times to add notes to my account to put that my account was being targeted by hackers and to not change any details, and they still did it.

“Nothing more I could have done and tbh I shouldn’t have to do anything. It is basic security, disgusting stuff.”

FUT Donkey also shared evidence of their email inbox, which shows various emails asking them to verify their identity, with the hackers appearing to use their email address to try and gain control of their account through an EA Help adviser.