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- Woe is the hombre: scammers have found a new way to cheat on the eve of the Hamster Kombat listing
Woe is the hombre: scammers have found a new way to cheat on the eve of the Hamster Kombat listing
Attackers found a new way to cheat on the eve of Hamster Kombat listing - they offer to withdraw money from the game at a favorable conversion rate into rubles. As soon as the user clicks on a dubious link and approves the transaction, he loses all his savings associated with his Telegram wallet. The number of such atrocities increased significantly in late September, when the developers summarized the results of the first season of the project. How to protect yourself in such a situation and whether you can sue the creators of "Hamster" - in the material "Izvestia".
Is it possible to earn in Hamster Kombat
Attackers activated on the wave of interest in the mobile game Hamster Kombat after the end of the first season. They offer to exchange virtual currency from the game on supposedly favorable terms.
- Criminals are constantly inventing new legends to lure credentials from accounts in messengers. According to the working scheme con artists send Russian users links to a phishing resource for authorization in the service. Through it allegedly you can withdraw coins from the sensational game Hamster Kombat and convert them into rubles. However, to do this, you need to authorize in Telegram and enter your credentials on the page that opens. This is how they steal access to the virtual wallet and other valuables," said Olga Svistunova, senior content analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
The criminals' goal remains to lure out the phone number and confirmation code, she added. Attackers can use the access to the accounts for various purposes, including stealing confidential data, blackmail and sending fraudulent messages to the contact list.
According to Kaspersky Lab, in the first half of 2024, the number of Russian users clicking on various phishing resources masquerading as Telegram increased by almost 22% compared to the same period in 2023. Hamster Kombat was and remains the main bait. Most often, scammers promise that payment for achievements in the game will occur within 15 minutes after successful authorization in Telegram.
Appeals on third-party advertising banners actively refer to the "creator of Hamster", who allegedly "got angry at the meager payouts for Russians and created his service for fair withdrawal", the author of one of the popular Telegram channels onthe IT sphere, Anton Ivanov, told Izvestia.
According to him, such pages with false promises are sent out using links in Telegram, where they promise to convert virtual tokens HMSTR (the game's currency) into rubles at a favorable rate. Deceivers use dissatisfaction with the low exchange rate as the main bait, and the pages themselves lead to phishing sites and anonymous chatbots whose owners are untraceable.
- After the news of HMSTR token price on the premarket, the fog of gold fever dissipated and many realized that they were being used to generate traffic and the revenue would not be shared with them. Millions of coins turned into pennies," Anton Ivanov concluded.
Now the price of HMSTR on the premarket is $0.01 per token, according to data from crypto exchange Bybit. Players were credited an average of 1-2 thousand HMSTR, that is, about 1-2 thousand rubles. On September 26, users will be able to withdraw their tokens, but not all of them, but only 10% of the total amount. As explained by experts, in fact, the earnings will be much lower and will amount to an average of 30-50 rubles for each month of active use of the program, which is unofficially called "hamster tap."
The results of the first season in "Hamster"
The popularity of criminal sites on the topic of Hamster Kombat is easily explained by the low threshold of entry and small cost of implementation. For example, to create a phishing page about "Hamster" is enough amount of up to 20 thousand rubles, said the head of BI.ZONE Brand Protection Dmitry Kiryushkin.
- From January to September 2024, our experts found more than 3.7 thousand domains that contain the word hamster in the name. The number of domains goes into the hundreds, and for the first three weeks of September, 372 sites have already been created. They mostly include fraudulent pages," he said.
According to analysts, Hamster Kombat has become the first mass project that has severely undermined user confidence in such games. Anton Ivanov believes that now the popularity of "clickers and tapaloks" will go down, as it was earlier with NFT-tokens.
- The user has no tools to influence earnings. How much is allowed to be withdrawn is how much will be withdrawn. Crypto, which is known for its decentralization, is just a way to deliver income to the user. Moreover, people will have to pay withdrawal fees to exchanges, and there's no telling how much the price of HMSTR tokens will drop when players start dumping them en masse. So $0.01 is far from a lower threshold," he reported.
There were also mass lockouts of players before the season recap. According to the head of Falcon eSports organization Roman Dorogavtsev, these measures were necessary.
- Now there are over 300 million participants in the game, 2.3 million were blocked, and 131 million people successfully qualified for token distribution. I know the Hamster Kombat community well, and the bans are well deserved. A lot of people were trying to cheat the system to get more resources. In the end, they were all expecting million-dollar payouts, but there is math that clearly distributes the amounts," he said.
All current quotes are listed on the premarket, the expert noted. The actual value of tokens will acquire only after the release on the crypto exchange, and it is scheduled for September 26. To consider the option with any claims will be possible only after the listing, which will fix the real coefficients and show whether the developers have really misled someone.
However, in order to sue the creators of Hamster Kombat, it is necessary to make sure that they actually violated the user agreement and did not provide the declared features and resources within the time period stipulated in the agreement, said Gennady Ionov, a lawyer of the company "Sphere". The document is always signed before the user is given access to the game. Probably, the developers are legally protected, as no amounts and tariffs are usually not fixed in such documents, but are formalized in more vague wording, the lawyer believes.
