Grand Theft Auto V sold more than $1 billion worth of units in a week – no wonder cybercriminals are tempted to cash in.
The scammers even went to the lengths of making the file convincingly large – it’s 18GB – and it has been downloaded “thousands” of times, according to WCCFTech, which originally reported the scam.
“The setup file is a realistic 18 GB and has an actual
setup.exe file, one that works. Basically a malicious replica of the
original setup file this one does not give out any hint of malicious
activity,” says WCCFTech. “Only after you get on the registration window
do you hit a snag. From there on, a .txt file located claims to have a
key on a page where the user is forced to do surveys.”
“And what about the 18GB worth of files itself? That’s less
clear,” the site writes. “ In a best-case scenario, it’s just junk data
that clogged your pipes and chewed up your bandwidth cap. In a
worst-case scenario—and a more likely one—it’s probably infested with
malware and other nasty stuff.”
Forbes points out that offering torrents of popular and unreleased games is a relatively common scam, with the as-yet-unreleased sci-fi game Titanfall already “available” on several sites.
Rockstar has yet to comment on the scam.
Pre-release films and games are often used as bait to lure victims to
spam pages, data-harvesting “surveys” or malware sites. Earlier this
year, streams of hit films were offered via document-sharing service
SlideShare – including then-unreleased titles such as Man of Steel and World War Z. The sites, of course, attempted to harvest information instead – and offered no video streams at all.
