A Florida man has been arrested by federal agents amid an FBI investigation into a Steam malware scheme said to have plundered crypto wallets in the past two years.
South Florida outlet Local 10 News reports that 21-year-old Zyaire Dontaevious Zamarion Wilkins was arrested on Tuesday, July 14 and charged with participating in the scheme, whose operators are collectively said to have stolen "at least $220,000" in cryptocurrencies from roughly 80 crypto wallets. On current charges, Wilkins faces up to 10 years in prison under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Steam and owner Valve are not specified in the federal complaint tied to Wilkins' arrest, but the FBI does specify Steam in a March request for victim information regarding malware threat actors believed to have been active "between the timeframe of May 2024 and January 2026," and the details of these incidents are closely aligned.
The FBI also listed several games identified in the malware scheme: "BlockBlasters, Chemia, Dashverse/DashFPS, Lampy, Lunara, PirateFi, and Tokenova." All of these games are no longer on Steam and, in SteamDB archives, have been flagged as "suspicious, as it may be malicious or impersonating another product."
The removal of BlockBlasters made headlines last year. Reported crypto figures indicate this one game was responsible for a majority of the malware distribution.
Agents say Wilkins and his collaborators promoted "eight games embedded with malware" online and ultimately reached "approximately 8,000 individual customers," apparently including several specific people targeted for their "large cryptocurrency holdings." Wilkins allegedly paid $10,000 for a Trojan program capable of the remote access necessary for this type of hack.
Local 10 News reports that Wilkins was tracked down via Bitrefill purchases of over 150 digital gift cards primarily for Uber Eats. The complaint adds that Wilkins' crypto history showed he had personally sent or received $382,000.
Malicious games and mods are not unheard of on Steam, and games are a relatively common vehicle for this type of malware. Earlier this year, a developer called out a worm-like mod which was evidently spreading through the UGC Steam Workshop and replacing other files "with itself."
