The makers of in-development blockchain MOBA Sparkball are “gutted” after their Discord server was hacked on Saturday (UTC) in a scam “clearly timed” to disrupt an early access weekend for the game.
Several community members posted to X that they had lost between $500 – $10,000 worth of NFTs after clicking on a scam link in the server to claim game token $SPARK, but those losses have yet to be verified.
The server was back up and running as of Sunday at 5pm (UTC) after being hacked in the early hours of Saturday morning, the project said, but the community was warned to be careful.
“We are (theoretically) back in control of our Discord. Be EXTRA careful until we fully confirm,” Worldspark Studios wrote in a post on X.
“New URL is http://discord.gg/Sparkball as the old URL was stolen… this was very clearly a timed hack for Early Access and we’re gutted this happened.”
Worldspark Studios CEO Chandler Thomlison said the hack was incredibly thorough.
“The website they set up was way too good to spin up overnight and this was clearly not their first time doing this process as they absolutely cleaned house and prevented any other way to get back in.
“It is absolutely terrible that this happened and we are sorry for anyone affected.”
In other evidence of the scammers’ meticulous approach, the original Sparkball Discord server was set to block messages with the words “scam” and “hack” so that community members could not warn each other of the breach.
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