Free V-Bucks? A wave of fake Fortnite sites is quietly stealing players' accounts

If someone in your house plays Fortnite - a teenager, a younger kid, you - this one's worth a quick conversation. Malwarebytes flagged a flood of scam sites this summer that all end the same way: on a counterfeit Epic Games login page that pockets the username and password the moment they're typed in.

The bait comes in several flavours. Some pages promise free V-Bucks (Fortnite's in-game currency). Others claim to be a tool that "calculates what your locker is worth." One dangles a fake $50 from a made-up superhero collaboration, and a cleverer version invents a "settlement refund," name-dropping the real 2022 case in which the FTC fined Epic $520 million. Every one of them leads to a lookalike sign-in page. Once the crooks have the login, they resell rare cosmetic items, tap any saved payment method, and try that same password on other sites. With roughly 110 million monthly players and over 650 million registered accounts - a lot of them kids - there's no shortage of targets.

The rule that defeats all of it: Epic doesn't run giveaways that make you log in through some other website, and there's no official tool that prices your account. Only ever sign in at epicgames.com itself, and turn on two-factor authentication on the Epic account - and on any linked Xbox, PlayStation or Google login - so a stolen password isn't enough on its own. If an account's already been taken, change the password and check the payment method attached to it.

This is a scam aimed at people, so knowing the pattern is the real defence - especially worth passing on to younger players. And if a "free V-Bucks" site ever talked someone into installing a browser add-on or a program, Tendvane's Safety check surfaces unexpected startup entries and extensions so you can spot what got left behind.