Scam – Page 7 – MMO Fallout

New Frontier is the current iteration of the fraud racket formerly known as Wild West Online, and as of this week it is officially in release mode. MMO Fallout has been covering New Frontier since the original shell company 612 Games was denying involvement from the industry’s most relentless shyster Sergey Titov (spoiler: He was and is involved). New Frontier was developed by Free Reign Entertainment who were behind the godawful reskin releases-slash-commercial failures that were Romero’s Aftermath, Shattered Skies, and Burstfire.

Don’t give Free Reign Entertainment money.

Super Rewards Is Dead, RuneScape Survey Takers Grieve

It is with great sorrow that I post the news at 1:30a.m. on Tuesday December 3 that Super Rewards, the place most of you RuneScape players went to for (occasionally) free keys in return for signing your name, email, and phone number to some of the internet’s shadiest scam artists, has disappeared.

If you head over to RuneScape and try to earn some free loot box keys with the Super Rewards service, you’ll be met with the message above. Now if you want your identity stolen in return for some RuneScape keys you’ll need to go with Jagex’s surviving partner, Peanut Labs. Peanuts, an apt description of the size of the payout.

Google Gives Us Another Reason To Have No Faith In Stadia

Google Stadia is one of the few places where your money would be better invested in Enron stocks or Zimbabwe currencies.

Now, those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I consider Google Stadia to be a multi-million dollar scam. Here you have a company selling you a service where you are forced to pay monthly in order to access games that you have to pay full price for as part of a service whose quality wholly depends on the reliability of Google’s servers as well as their connection to your home. What happens when Google decides to shut down Stadia? Product director and accessory to fraud Andrey Doronichev refuses to answer the question and has consistently dodged the question because we all know the answer: You lose access to your purchases for good.

“I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary,” he said. “I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it’s hard to find a CD player these days :)”

Maybe it is if you’re in the Google echo chamber, but I was able to find a CD player at just about every store I went to outside of the grocery store.

I tacitly endorse people avoiding Google Stadia at all cost, and for a simple reason: Google doesn’t care about its products. It doesn’t care about you as a customer. It treats its products as “experiments” and will readily abandon them and shut down services at a whim, because they no longer feel like doing that anymore. And the people who put money into that product? Google couldn’t care less about ripping them off, it just moves on to the next “experiment” funded off of eager customers.

Don’t believe me? In 2019, Google shut down or announced the shuttering of:

Chromecast audio
Google Realtime API
Youtube video annotations
Google notification widget
Google Allo
URL Shortener
Google+
Inbox by Google
Data Saver Extension
Cloud Messaging
Youtube Gaming
Areo
Blog Compass
Google Jump
Google Trips
Works with Nest
Youtube for 3DS
Youtube Messages
G-Suite Training
Google Daydream
Google Clips
Google Bulletin
Google Fusion Tables
Google translator toolkit
Google Correlate
Hangouts on Air
Fabric
Hire by Google
Google Hangouts
Daydream VR

And we’re supposed to have faith that Stadia will be run for years to come?

I don’t trust Google Stadia because I don’t trust Google. I don’t trust when they say they’re in it for the long haul because anything they could say to reassure me has already been used to lie about previous, now defunct products. I don’t trust that Google won’t suddenly lose interest in the product and then abandon it at a moment’s notice. And what good is the promise today that they are going to keep it going in two years when they sadly announce that it’s coming to an end?

It’s worthless. Google’s word in supporting its products is worthless.

Steam Cleaning: Valve Now Moderating Workshop Submissions

You may have visited Steam’s workshop in the past and thought to yourself “this Counter Strike section could do with a lot less scam submissions in the workshop.” For those unaware, distributors of unsavory material have been targeting the Steam workshop for years by submitting fake maps with alluring titles offering free skins or free knives, and then linking users to websites that would steal their information.

Dangerous yes, and for those smart enough to not fall for said scam, an absolute annoyance as they were a constant nuisance and ever present. Unfortunately for those rascally scam artists, that era has come to an end.

Valve this week has updated the process with which workshop items are approved, and now new submissions must be approved manually by Valve staff before they are publicly visible. The same goes for any updates to existing workshop items. For its part, Valve is promising speedy approval with most submissions being approved within a day.

“Newly submitted and updated items will be placed into a moderation queue. You’ll be able view and edit the content during this process, but other players will not be able to view changes until they’re approved. For updates to existing items, subscribers will have access to the previously approved version if there is one. The approval process should be completed in less than a day. If you have any questions on the process, please contact Steam Support“

The news specifically mentions that this change is targeting scams and account theft through the workshop, so it is unlikely that Valve is policing any content other than weeding out the fake giveaways.

Source: Steam

Valve Combats Workshop Scams With New Update

When it comes to updating the quality of life of its store, Valve is like a particularly slow iceberg. That said, they do tend to get to their destination. Eventually.

If you pay attention to the drama of the Steam community, you’re probably well aware of an issue plaguing specifically Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. The workshop for both games, and others, has been the target of an onslaught of scams. The scams generally come in the form of ads for free skins, free items, rare skins, giveaways, promotional content, etc. The actual guides lead to phishing websites, infect the user’s computer with malware, keyloggers, etc, and ultimately all you’re left with is a VAC-banned Steam account and an empty inventory. Generally these guides were posted by accounts stolen from other similar scams.

With this week’s update, Steam will now send an email to the account owner when a new item is posted for the first time, asking them to review and confirm the item that was posted. The goal is twofold, to plug the endless stream of scam guides without creating unnecessary hassle for frequent workshop creators, and to inform a user that their account has been compromised without their knowledge. The effectiveness of the new system will have to be seen.

Source: Steam

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