Following a number of high-profile FIFA 22 Ultimate Team traders reporting that their accounts have been hacked and drained of FIFA points and in-game currency, EA has responded by saying an investigation is underway and work is being done to restore everything these players have lost.
EA shared its update on the ongoing situation on its The Pitch Notes page, saying that it can confirm that a number of accounts were "compromised via phishing techniques."
"Utilizing 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," EA wrote.
As of this writing, EA estimates that less than 50 accounts were impacted by these hackers and 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."
EA also shared a list of actions it has already taken to "increase the administrative and technical safeguards for EA Accounts." The changes are as follows;
- 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 warns this may "impact customer experience wait times," but it also reassures that these are necessary steps that need to be made to keep EA Accounts safe.
These hackers appeared to have filed support tickets to EA and were able to convince the customer service representatives to give them the associated e-mail and a password reset link. Some of these hackers would just try over and over again until one representative gave them what they were looking for.
For more, check out our FIFA 22 review and the story on how 30,000 players were recently banned for taking advantage of a "no loss" glitch" in the game's Ultimate Team mode.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.