A startling tweet from MTGO’s Twitter account highlights a problem that has been going on in the background for the last few weeks. It turns out a myriad of MTG players are becoming the victim of a wave of MTG hacks sweeping across the platform. By becoming aware of the events at hand, we hope you will take some liberties to protect yourself in case you are targeted.
MTG Hacks are Cleaning Accounts Out
The tweet above from @JohnPwhetstone has started a cascading number of reports of MTGO players where players are getting hacked and having their Tix and cards stolen. For Arena players who are unfamiliar with MTGO, unlike MTG Arena, you can trade cards between accounts on MTGO. This allows for players to trade cards acquired for in-game currency or even real cash. Unfortunately, it also makes MTGO a target of events like these.
Tix is simply the in-game currency for Magic Online. One Tix is, generally, about the value of a single American dollar.
Most MTGO accounts will have a playable deck on them. For reference, a deck’s price on MTGO is comparable to a deck’s price on paper. While individual card prices fluctuate heavily, prices for Modern decks, the most popular format on the platform, on MTGO vary between $200 to $1000! It’s not uncommon for seasoned players to have thousands of dollars in cards on their accounts.
While hacking has been a rarity on the platform for a little while now, MTGO’s official response is what prompted some players to start sounding the alarm:
Change Your Passwords
Following JohnPwhetstone‘s plea for a fix from MTG Online, the official account responded, asking everyone else who “haven’t reset your account password recently” to “do so through Account Settings in-game – and make it unique to MTGO.”
The new replies to this post suggest that this has hit players site-wide, and not everyone has been lucky enough to be granted an opportunity to reacquire their stolen goods. This event is incredibly recent, so there are likely to be many more replies like this to come soon.
Why is this Happening?
We have not yet been given a reason as to why players should be resetting their account passwords. This has led to some replies, like the one above, asking if there is an outside reason why players should be resetting their passwords. At this point, it’s safe to say that anyone with an MTGO account should consider resetting their password to a unique one they haven’t used before. As mentioned by MTG personality IamActuallyLvL1, this hack may be a part of a significant data breach from a different source.
If you are an unfortunate target of these MTG hacks, contact customer support ASAP. Twitter replies suggest that, while not everyone has received compensation, it is a possibility. Once again, outside of the recent wave of hacks, we don’t know why MTGO is asking players to change their passwords. That said, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
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