You’re chiling on Discord when a friends request comes in. You check and see who it’s from and what server they have in common with you. They ask you if you play a certain game, and if you’re not familar with it they tell you oops, they meant to friend someone else, but that’s okay. You and they chat for a while and they invite you to the freemium mobile game they mentioned earlier. Also, you don’t have to be alone, you can join their guild and do raids together, doesn’t that sound great? And they’ll send you a link as well to the app so you can download it.

Once you’ve downloaded the game and joined their guild, the pressure begins. Everybody wants you to buy a package that is easily $100 or more so that you can help your guild. They can even tell you a cheaper place to buy it, but it’s off the game’s store. And then you’ll be pressured to pay more and more until you’re either out of money you can spend or have cut your new ‘friends’ (all the same scammer or different scammers working together) off. Worse, the package either doesn’t contain all the virtual items or is greatly overpriced. In some cases, you get nothing at all. Occasionally your new ‘friend’ sends you to a version of the software that’s otherwise legit and works with the game’s servers but all your money goes to the scammers’ bank account.

This type of scam is almost always seen with a specific type of freemium mobile game where the developers allow - or maybe turn a blind eye to - outside trading of accounts and items, as well as allow clients other than the official one to connect to their servers. A current example (as of the time this article was written) is Infinity Kingdom, or IK for short, a base building game where you raid other player/guilds.

Another version of this scam has the same end goal, but instead of friending random people on Discord, a scammer finds their way into a guild in another mobile game and entices players from that game to join their guild on the new game as the original game is unexciting/dying.

How to protect yourself
If you can, turn Discord DMs and friend requests off. For various reasons, this may not be feasible to everybody, but if you do not have a need to have friends requests or DMs open you should close them via Discord settings. Be cautious with chats and use common sense. These scammers rely on someone thinking “oh, I share a Discord server with them, they’re harmless” and the tendency in a shared hobby space to be friendly and trust the other person.

For very obvious reasons, never download software from someone’s link. Search the game in the app store. If it seems to be from the app store but under a different name, do not download it. Also, before you download anything, search the game name + the word “scam” to see if what you’ve encountered matches a known scam.

Even if it doesn’t, think about the relationship between the game that’s been mentoned and the server you have in common. For example, if the server is for a cozy game such as Stardew Valley, it’s very weird that someone would ask you if you played a random non-cozy freemium mobile game. Now, if you’ve mentioned in the server in an off-topic channel that “I play game xyz”, then it wouldn’t be so weird, but chances are that you haven’t done that.