Crypto Gaming Discord Group: https://discord.gg/Na27xKC

The last few posts have been very upbeat in nature (I hope), but last night my mood changed. An exit scam occurred on a game I was involved in, and 44 ETH was stolen from the players. Lucky for me, I was out of the game, so I didn't lose any money. However, it still left me nauseous seeing all the other players lose their money in this manner. So, I wanted to try to discuss what happened and give a warning of advice.

First, I guess I should start off with my warning of advice. I will be recommending games to play with my opinion only. If you decide to invest or play in a game like this, you should only do so with ETH that you don't mind losing. 99% of the time, the ETH you will be "losing" will be at the gain of a digital asset (a picture of a cat, a celebrity, a city, etc), but there are instances when something like this could occur. I have seen a scam like this and an error in the code which caused players to lose their money, so you should only put in what you are willing to use. One of the posts in that discord channel above was about ending their life because they lost 2.5 ETH. These games should be about fun and you should earn some money if you don't put all your eggs in one basket.

The other thing that was nice to see is that the discord community above did a small fundraising campaign for the players who lost their money - at least that was the look of the post in there. While all these guys in that channel are just screen names, it is nice to see a community of people who are trying to build something together even when this type of event occurred. So onto what happened:

The Scam

There was a game called Ether World Cup. At first, you bought the countries of the entrants of the world cup followed by the club teams. I did buy a entrant of the world cup which was bought out from me. If that didn't happen, I would have lost money in this scam. On day 3, they were going to start releasing players where the owners of the club teams and countries would receive dividends on the sales of the players. When they did that release, they updated the code so that all the purchases of players would head straight to a central wallet. After 44 ETH of transactions went through, the money was transferred out to another wallet, the discord group was shut down, and the following screen shot was on the website.

What I don't really understand is that this game was really taking off. He could have made more than 44 ETH by just letting the game continue and make it honestly. But, that is not what he decided to do. And, that is an important reminder - regardless of what part of life you are dealing with, some people just suck!!! There will always be cheaters and scammers, but there will also be people who want to do the right thing.

The Aftermath

Things seem to be getting back to normal today. Assets are being flipped, pictures are being dropped, new games are showing up, but there is a little sense of caution. People aren't jumping all in on things, so maybe that is a good thing. Code is being verified and developers are being questioned about the security of their applications. However, just like with anything, as time goes on, the guard will come down and people will be throwing everything at the games again soon. In crypto world, that will probably be later tonight.

And I really do recommend that discord group who discusses games that are out. There are developers in there and I trust their recommendation on the security of the applications that are released.

But, just remember - have fun playing these games, but don't put anymore in than you want to lose or spend on a digital asset. It's only a game!!! There are much more important things in your life.

Until the next game and hopefully back to a little rosier attitude...