In a recent bizarre Steam incident, scammers attempted to mislead players by creating fake listings for Helldivers 2. The listings claimed to offer significant discounts, enticing players to fall for their scheme taking advantage of Arrowhead Studios' game.
Some observant players quickly realized that the real Helldivers 2 Steam page on Steam did not have any discounts, making it clear that these were scam attempts.
To try and pull off their scam, the hoaxers manipulated store pages for games titled Figurality and DO NOT SMILE, changing them entirely to mimic Helldivers 2's Steam landing page.
Changes included altering the game title, developer, and publisher information. Fest Studio and Bside Studio were identified as the publishers involved in these fraudulent activities by Valve. Their pages have been taken down as well.
Helldivers 2 community manager, Twinbeard, posted a warning on the game's official Discord server, clarifying that the only real versions of Helldivers 2 available on Steam are the standard edition and the Super Citizen Edition, both released on February 8.
Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt took to Twitter to condemn the creation of these fake listings and highlighted the ease with which they were produced. While Valve has since removed the fake Helldivers 2 listings, concerns linger about the vulnerability in Steam's backend that allowed these scams to occur so easily.
This issue actually extends beyond Helldivers 2, as there have been reports of similar scams targeting other massive games, such as Palworld, with Pocketpair community manager responding to Pilestedt's tweet confirming the action-adventure Pokémon-inspired game had been victim of this scam as well.
The way developers try to pull this scam is by seemingly changing store listing information for their existing games to imitate Helldivers 2 or other popular titles. Meaning it's quite likely a long-term plan with their games listed ahead of time to avoid suspicions early on.
So there you have it. Always remember to double-check before you purchase something online. For more content, check out our speculative Helldivers 2 roadmap for 2024.