Steam Game Steals $32K In Donations To Stage 4 Cancer Patient As Hackers Hit New Low

While some would like to see themselves as Robin Hood-type, well-intentioned opportunists, it has long been known that there is no honor among thieves. Case in point: today's story, where a man named Raivo Plavnieks was trying to raise money for treatment to survive stage 4 high-grade sarcoma, and became the target of a malicious crypo stealer masquerading as a legitimate Steam game.

Raivo, a 26-year old self-described "crypto degen" perhaps better known as "rastaland", was diagnosed earlier this year with the deadly sarcoma that he describes as "growing faster than a [crypto] pump." The Latvian man has been trying to raise funds for his treatment, and was doing a live stream explicitly for that purpose when someone entered the chat and invited him to try out a free-to-play Steam game called BlockBlasters. Immediately afterward, over $32,000 USD of cryptocurrency were stolen from his wallet live on stream, leaving him afraid for not only the future of his cancer treatment but even for how he was going to feed himself next week.


To be clear, BlockBlasters appears to have been a legitimate video game at one point. It was a real, playable game, albeit one with simplistic mechanics and visuals, for at least six weeks, and in that time it accumulated a couple hundred reviews, enough of which were positive to give the game a "very positive" score on Steam. However, it turns out that on August 30th, the game was updated to include a crypto-stealer script.

Malware researchers at VX Underground took a look at the title and immediately spotted the malware in the form of a Windows batch file that searches a disk for browser credentials and crypto wallets. There is, obviously, no valid explanation for this, and it's clear that this game was either created as, or turned into, a dedicated tool for exactly what happened to Raivo -- someone pops in the stream chat or social media DMs with a burner account, says 'hey try this free Steam game!', and then the streamer gets their cryptocurrency stolen.

The story goes that these people were spotted on social media talking about cryptocurrency and then specifically targeted by sending invitations to try out the game. Purportedly, the mastermind behind these attacks was an Argentinian immigrant living in Miami, Florida, who has now been reported to ICE. Here's hoping he suffers the full force of the criminal justice system for his heinous crimes.


The truly galling part of this tale is that Valve allowed BlockBlasters to remain on Steam for at least a week and possibly as long as two weeks after it was reported to be malware by the German cybersecurity experts GDATA. It's well known among PC gamers that Valve's curation of Steam is weak at the best of times, but the company absolutely has to act faster than this on these types of reports, as this isn't the first, second, or third time this kind of thing has happened. According to the security group, as many as 907 people may have been victims of this kind of attack.


At least this story has a silver lining, for once. While Raivo's GoFundMe for his cancer treatment is still only sitting at 67% as of this posting, multiple big names in the crypto community have come forward to support him, including Easy (@EasyEatsBodega), streamer and YouTuber Mizkif, and the self-described "Master Chief of Crypto," Alex Becker. Each promised donations in the five-digit range, and Alex Becker apparently donated the full $32,500 himself to compensate Raivo for the theft. Their incredible generosity warms the heart, but altruism has its limits and so we should remember to stay vigilant against this kind of threat.