Palworld developer Pocketpair has a lot to celebrate in just a short amount of time, as the game has already passed the 19 million player milestone in just two weeks. But while celebrating with them, don’t get suckered into an apparent NFT scam.
At the top of the replies of the celebratory X post on the Palworld account is a reply that, at first glance, looks like the official Japanese account for the game advertising a new Palworld NFT. The two-part reply encourages players to visit the official looking website and connect their crypto wallet to “earn in-game rewards and earn Palworld merchandise.”
The account at least is putting on a good show: The same description from the official English account is translated to Japanese, and the best part of its disguise is the yellow checkmark that official organizations and affiliate accounts of said organizations have attached on their X accounts.
But this is not the official Japanese Palworld account. If you click on the yellow checkmark of the official English Palworld account, a popup window appears stating the account is affiliated with the actual Japanese Palworld account, which is linked. The actual account features the 19 million player announcement translated to Japanese, but with no mention of NFTs anywhere.
There are a number of other factors that indicate the account promoting NFTs is a fraud. Most notably, the user name is “Palworlds_JP” instead of “Palworld_JP,” and the account has less than 1500 followers.
While NFT scams using fake accounts is nothing new (and neither are scam accounts and apps pretending to be Palworld), it speaks volumes about the state of X (formerly Twitter) given its allowed a fake account marked with its “golden checkmark” to potentially scam players of the breakout game of the year so far.
Don’t get scammed.
