Recently, a number of high-profile accounts have been hacked on FIFA 22. These Ultimate Team traders have had their FIFA points and in-game currency depleted. EA released a statement yesterday responding to the issue, saying the problem is currently under investigation with a plan to return everything that was taken from the players.
EA made a blog post on The Pitch Notes portion of the FIFA 22 website, discussing the ongoing issue. The company has confirmed that several accounts have been “compromised via phishing techniques.” EA went on to describe that the hackers utilized “threats and other ‘social engineering’ methods, individuals acting maliciously were able to exploit human error within our customer experience team and bypass two-factor authentication to gain access to player accounts.”
The following is a list of actions that EA said it has already taken to “increase the administrative and technical safeguards for EA Accounts.” See below:
- All EA Advisors and individuals who assist with service of EA Accounts are receiving individualized re-training and additional team training, with a specific emphasis on account security practices and the phishing techniques used in this particular instance.
- We are implementing additional steps to the account ownership verification process, such as mandatory managerial approval for all email change requests.
- Our customer experience software will be updated to better identify suspicious activity, flag at-risk accounts, and further limit the potential for human error in the account update process.
EA estimates that less than 50 accounts have been compromised and says that it is working to “identify rightful account owners to restore access to their accounts, and the content within, and players affected should expect a response from our team shortly.” The company also warns that this process may “impact customer experience wait times” and has assured that they are doing everything necessary to keep players’ accounts safe.
It seems that the hackers filed support tickets to EA and in doing so, were able to learn the associated email and get a password reset link. Hopefully, EA is able to quickly restore the affected accounts and return everything they’ve lost.