FIFA 22, Hacking accounts, EA Help in the sights of the community

After a new wave of FUT account hacking, the EA Help support system is in the sights of the FIFA 22 community. cards and credits. Indeed, since the launch of the season, several hundred pro players, traders and other members of the community have had their accounts hacked. If initially, some suspected illegal activities (account sharing, use of third-party software and sale/purchase of credits), it now seems that the problem is actually on the side of EA and its EA Help support system. The situation is such that players are now talking about legal action against the company since the security of players' personal data is also at stake...

Update : As of Tuesday, January 11 at 16 p.m., EA has published an official response to the FUT account hacking question.

EA's response to hacking

A much more appropriate response from EA was posted on Tuesday, January 11. The studio cites human error from its EA Help support and wants to improve its security and account recovery system.

A wave of hacked accounts on FIFA 22

As mentioned in the introduction, this situation began with the regular hacking of members of the top 100 of the transfer earnings ranking. If at the beginning, some streamers joked about the fact that they had stopped trading so as not to be hacked, the hacking of accounts has spread from week to week. This is how thousands of accounts have been emptied of all their sellable cards and credits since the launch of FIFA 22. Among them, we find profiles like Bateson87, NickRunTheFutMarket, Trymacs or even FUT Donkey (leader of the trading ranking at the time of the hack).

For once, if these players have a chance to recover the content of their account relatively easily, others are less lucky. Thus, players whose profile is less known have struggled to recover their credits and cards, pushing some of them to give up the game for the season.

The concern being that EA often explains that it is the player who made a request to EA Help to change his logs and thus, that he is responsible for the loss of the content... An answer which seems strange but which allowed some to understand how hacking takes place.

EA Help, at the heart of the hacking of FUT accounts

Indeed, after several weeks of hacking for no reason, players have finally understood the technique of hackers: they obtain player IDs, via their stream or via in-game requests (which is absolutely legal), to then contact EA Help. There hackers pretend to be the owner of the account by giving the player ID and sometimes the email. They then ask for a change in the logs, the password or the email associated with the account. And despite a process that normally has many barriers to limit account theft, hackers have managed to steal hundreds and hundreds of accounts.

Therefore, it is certain that a change is necessary on the side of EA and its system since hackers should absolutely not be able to recover an account with only an ID. In addition, being directly responsible for the problem, the American giant should also work more actively to recover the content of the accounts. But for the moment, the communication between the community and EA seems more than cold…

This is why the most active members have decided to take matters into their own hands: a petition on change.org (in English) has already been signed by several thousand players while others are talking about legal action. This is the case of FUT Donkey, who, after trying to contact EA, mentioned a desire to launch legal action against the group (in English).

This might seem like a disproportionate reaction, but we're not just talking about having access to a FUT account: hackers also have access to the player's personal data, or even their banking information. The failure of EA Help's support system to protect this information could clearly trigger lawsuits in many countries.  

However, EA seems to have heard the anger of the players since the group is supposed to publish a statement in the next few days in order to find a solution on this situation, both the hacking of accounts and the recovery of data on accounts. In the meantime, this wave of hacking of FIFA 22 FUT accounts via EA Help demonstrates once again that hackers are still one step ahead of the studios…