EA Sports Confirms Investigation Into FIFA Ultimate Team Scandal
Electronic Arts has officially launched an investigation into allegations of a company employee selling rare FIFA Ultimate Team player cards online.
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Electronic Arts Sports has confirmed an investigation into the current FIFA Scandal after an employee was accused online of selling rare FIFA Ultimate Team Player cards for real money. After the uprising on social media from fans of the sporting game franchise who felt cheated by the employee, EA was forced to acknowledge the issue and has now officially begun an investigation.
FIFA Ultimate Team Player cards accumulate a lot of money for EA. The FIFA franchise has included the Ultimate Team Player mode for some years now, with some players buying the new FIFA games just to continue with this game mode. Ultimate Team Player lets players spend in-game currency and real-world money on collectible cards based on real-life professional players that can be used to construct makeshift teams and compete against other players.
Over the weekend, EA has publicly acknowledged that the company is actively investigating the scandal in the FIFA Ultimate Team franchise. In response to the allegations online, EA and FIFA’s developer’s have also suspended all discretionary content granting for an indefinite period. Electronic Arts shared the following online statement:
“Earlier this week, we were made aware of suspicious activity relating to highly rated content in FIFA Ultimate Team. We learned that FUT items were granted to individual accounts that did not earn them through gameplay… Our initial investigation shows questionable activity involving a very small number of accounts and items. Although it is not a large number, if these allegations prove out, this activity is unacceptable. We want to thank our committed community members for bringing the issue to our attention so quickly.”
EA has a system that allows FIFA’s developers to give specific players in-game rewards for Ultimate Team Player. Generally, this feature is only used to give players cards as an apology for technical issues or accidental item deletion. EA also uses this method to give famous video game influencers free content, but the number of cards distributed this way would only attribute to 0.00006% of the total player items in the FIFA 21 ecosystem, which is much too small of a margin to inflate the FUT online economy. It’s believed that the alleged employee used this method to transfer the rare FUT cards into the buyer’s account.
This system is now suspended while the investigation is underway, with the company taking a hard look at just how something like this could have happened. Hopefully, once EA gets to the bottom of this, it will be able to regain the trust of its player base and prevent a breach such as this from happening ever again.
FIFA 21 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Stadia.
Source: EA Sports
Liv Harris is an Australian Freelance Journalist based in Sydney. She is an avid gamer and loves TV/Movies. Liv writes mostly writes about video games, the latest movies and TV shows. She wrote for Kotaku and Gamespot before joining Screen Rant.
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