Crypto scams are nothing new, but it seems like scammers are stepping up their game, even using popular brands like Fortnite as decoy.
Epic Games CEO and co-founder Tim Sweeney rang the bell about decentralized exchanges like PancakeSwap for “enabling” the use of fake Fortnite tokens.
“There isn’t a Fortnite cryptocurrency,” Sweeney wrote, adding that “the Twitter accounts promoting such a thing are a scam. Epic’s lawyers are on it. Also, shame on the cryptocurrency marketplaces that enable this kind of thing.” Sweeny tweeted.
Indeed, a token dubbed “Fortnite Token” (FNT), is reportedly trading on decentralized exchanges SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, and CronaSwap. However, a search on those platforms is not returning any token listing as of press time, but the nature of decentralized exchanges allow users to trade virtually any currency, as long as the manually input the address.
Sweeney further took his allegations towards the face Twitter profile, nothing that “anybody involved in this is being scammed.”
The scammers, as Sweeney calls them, published an answer to his claims, stressing that “this is a fair-launch, community-driven, Fortnite game fans-created cryptocurrency project with no specified owner or company structure behind it or a CEO deciding on its future.”
No need to worry about a Fortnite scam?
Sweeney’s claims seem to be over exaggerated, as very few are trading the FNT token, which is currently worth $0.0000007673 per FNT. Furthermore, the token has only seen about $250 in total volume traded over the past 24 hours.
Interestingly, the Fortnite brand, which exploded in 2017 and operating with over 350 million registered users worldwide, is not net to crypto scams. In October 2021 scammers tried to exchange users’ V-Bucks (the in-game non-crypto virtual currency) for U.S. dollars via the use of the unauthorized Fortnite Coin.
Epic games goes Web3?
Despite Fortnite still having no access to crypto-related products, another Epic Games store title - Gala Games’ upcoming release GRIT, would be the first blockchain-enabled game to be released, which also comes with NFTs. GRIT would use NFTs to prove ownership of in-game items or other digital assets.
Sweeney, however, made a clear announcement in September 2021, stressing that the company is nowhere near “touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams.”
“When new technology emerges, some put it to good use, and others put it to bad use. It would be terribly shortsighted to ban an entire field of technology for such a reason,” Sweeney added after the Fortnite scam case.
DeFi and NFTs are going down
The overall bearish sentiment of the crypto sector has hit hard both the realms of decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens. According to data from DeFi Pulse, the total value locked (TVL) of the DeFi sector currently sits at $48.5 billion, with Ethereum being the weapon of choice when it comes to preferred blockchain.
In just six months, the TVL value dropped in half from over $100 billion on December 3, 2021. MakerDAO is still the biggest DeFi project to date. When it comes to NFTs, the popularity drop is even more shocking. As cryptobrowser.io already reported, the “Interest over time” metric from the biggest search engine to date – Google, shows a sharp decline since the sector’s peak popularity in the late November of 2021.