Since Facebook announced its rebrand as Meta Inc — a Metaverse company, the virtual worlds space has been gaining a lot more attention than before. However, with the emergence of any technology, there come many risks.
The rapid inflow of cash and the non-regulatory nature of space have made the virtual worlds space a perfect crime scene for cyberattackers and scammers, according to threat researchers from Cisco’s Talos Intelligence Group.
“There’s a huge potential for things like fraud and other traditional crimes, without there having the safety precautions that you have in other areas,” Cisco Talos head of outreach Nicki Biasini told Insider. “And for the people affected by these scams, there’s not a lot of recourse.”
Talos logged several scams and many of these resemble tactics that date back to the infancy dates of the internet when social engineers future themselves as reliable sellers to trick people into spending and sharing their personal information. The new technology called Metaverse — which relies on cryptocurrency payments and digital assets built on a blockchain — is a new avenue for scammers to defraud people.
