CSGO skins worth $700,000 hacked and stolen, as FPS surges on Steam
A vast quantity of CSGO skins, reportedly worth $700,000 USD (£578,000 GBP) has been hacked and stolen from popular Counter-Strike trading site CSGOEXO, which is currently offline as it attempts to recover the items from Steam and Valve. It comes as the FPS game surges in popularity, with CSGO beating its own record for concurrent players twice in the same month.
If you’re unfamiliar with the world of CSGO skins and trading, the shooter essentially has its own digital economy, whereby in-game items like weapon designs and stickers are bought and sold by players, often for incredibly high prices.
The prices of weapon skins in CSGO are based around their rarity and ‘float’ value – essentially a measure of how often they have actually been used in the game. A skin with 0.00 float is the most valuable, since it is essentially unused – imagine buying a rare action figure and never taking it out of the box. 1.00 float skins are the most worn, and, as such, the least valuable.
One CSGO skin, the ‘Karambit Hardened Case Blue Gem’ for the game’s combat knife, is reportedly worth around $1,500,000 USD (£1,238,000 GBP). A version of M4 ‘Howl’ skin, pictured below, was sold in 2020 for $100,000 USD (£82,000 GBP).
Counter-Strike skins are traded between players using various sites and platforms. CSGOEXO is one such trading post, and now says it has been the victim of a hack, with intruders stealing $700,000 worth of CSGO skins.
“The CSGOEXO.COM website is temporarily down,” a disclaimer on the site’s frontpage reads, “as unfortunately $700,000 worth of skins were illegally stolen from the site in the early hours of February 15. We’ll do our best to restore the normal functioning of the website. We have already contacted Steam.”
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