Last week news broke of a supposed hack of Epic Games in which a hacker gang called Mogilevich claimed to have gotten away with 189GB of data from Epic Games – a claim that the company immediately rebutted as one with “zero evidence.” We can now follow up on the story with reported confirmation that, yes, the claim was a lie, but supposedly it was for the group to trick someone out of $85,000.
This totally unsurprising revelation was in a link that suggested it would lead to the cache of data but instead led to an announcement made by a Mogilevich representative by the name of Pongo, who admits that “we are not a ransomware-as-a-service, but professional fraudsters.”
The rest of the yarn woven by Pongo claims that multiple buyers approached them for a buyout of the fake data, one of whom was sweet-talked into the $85K – the group even claims that they allowed this person to talk Mogilevich down from its original $100K asking price. “We made him believe that we had other buyers who were pressing us and that they wanted the projects as soon as possible,” the admission claims. “We were immediately contacted by interested people, one of them was put at ease, as if he were the boss at the time.”
So then the question remains: Why admit to this at all? “This was done to illustrate the process of our scam,” Pongo writes. “We don’t think of ourselves as hackers but rather as criminal geniuses, if you can call us that.”
Sure, kid.
Our investigation has concluded. The group’s claims were never legitimate – this was a scam.
— Epic Games Newsroom (@EpicNewsroom) March 4, 2024
