Scammers pretend to be farming sim Coral Island, with extra NFTs
Halloween may be over, but island farming sim Coral Island seems to have spawned a social media doppelganger with a desire for NFTs. Coral Island developer Stairway Games has drawn attention to the scam account, which uses the real game’s logo and key art, but adds an additional web3 cryptobro twist by connecting to the GameFi blockchain gaming platform. Stairway, as you would, calls shenanigans.
“We are not an NFT game and the site below has no affiliation with Coral Island,” Stairway tweeted, along with a picture of the spoofing account. The NFT account only started publishing a few days ago, but strangely enough, it was created back in March 2020. Unlike Stairway’s real location in Indonesia, the NFT spoofers are of course located in the Metaverse. They’ve also set up their own Discord server, Instagram account, and an entire website pretending to be Stairway.
It’s good to see that the scam account has lost 90% of its followers since Stairway posted to alert people, dropping from 2,500 to just 222 at the time of writing. Stairway has been working on Coral Island for years and only launched it for early access a few weeks ago. It’s unfortunate that someone has chosen to target a small indie game like this. Responding to Stairway’s tweet, they said they had reported the account to Twitter for impersonation. It’s not the first time something like this has happened, with scammers targeting sci-fi team Outerverse earlier this year.
Hey guys, this isn’t us. @coralislandgame is the only twitter page for the Coral Island game. We are not an NFT game and the site below has no affiliation with Coral Island. Thank you! pic.twitter.com/Aei1650McT
— Stairway Games (@stairwaygames) 31 October 2022
Alice Bee enjoyed playing the game itself in the Coral Island Early Access review last month, especially its handy recyclable trash resource. “The explicitly ecological angle of Coral Island, where the more you provide local produce, and the cleaner you make the seabed, the higher the city’s rating will be, will be motivation enough for some people,” she said. “But Coral Island integrates that into the way you play, so you kind of end up caring about the environment by proxy if not by altruism.”
The real Coral Island is in Early Access on Steam for £20/$25/€25. It does not contain any NFTs.
