At 8:00 PM EST on March 14, 2024, users of the social media platform Twitter were shocked to see what appeared to be the official Twitter account for Activision advertising a crypto scam!
This post mentioned that the company would be launching a wallet-sucking scam known as $ATVI alongside Solanalabs. Further down the post, it’s mentioned that these tokens can be exchanged for items in Activision Blizzard games.
While it may appear at first glance that the company has sunk to a new low in a desire to take everything from player’s wallets, the truth is thankfully not as sinister. It appears that the social media accounts of Activision were taken over by malicious hackers.
Aside from the obvious scam language that is par for the course of crypto scams, the tweet included a decades-old render of Crash Bandicoot to try and draw people in. Activision has not used this render of Crash in many years and if the announcement was official they would have used a more recent render.
The only reason for this render to appear in this ad is because a scammer saw that Crash had a jetpack and likely wanted to tie the imagery into the common crypto advertising phrase “To the moon!”
At the time of posting this article, Activision has yet to remove the tweet or make an official statement about the hacking. It is likely that the company will take control of the situation and delete all traces of it in the morning.
This hacking is another piece of bad publicity in a long line of controversies surrounding the Activision Blizzard brand. The company has become the face of a bad working environment and crunch culture in the eyes of gamers. If it weren’t for the old render, many could have believed this was a real post from the publisher.