A 21-year-old University of West Florida student named Zyaire Wilkins was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday after federal prosecutors alleged he spent nearly two years hiding crypto-stealing malware inside video games published on Steam. The scheme infected around 8,000 victims and drained at least $220,000 worth of cryptocurrency from roughly 80 wallets.

Games Built to Look Real

The operation ran from May 2024 through February 2026. Wilkins and a number of unnamed co-conspirators allegedly uploaded multiple fully playable games to Steam, titles including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lampy, Lunara, PirateFi, Chemia, DashFPS, and Tokenova. These weren't obviously broken or empty shells. Players could download, install, and actually play them, which is precisely what made the trap effective. While victims were gaming, the malware quietly harvested passwords, personal data, and crypto wallet credentials in the background.

The group didn't just wait for random downloads either. According to the FBI complaint, they promoted the games across Discord, Telegram, X, and LinkedIn, and deployed bots to identify accounts with large cryptocurrency holdings. Those users then received targeted messages pushing them toward the infected titles.

Uber Eats and 150 Gift Cards

Investigators traced the stolen Bitcoin out of the scheme's wallet and into a chain of more than 150 gift cards, most of them redeemed on Uber Eats. That paper trail led directly to Wilkins. A subpoena to Uber matched the card redemptions to an account tied to deliveries at his family home in North Lauderdale and his addresses at the University of West Florida.

When agents searched the North Lauderdale residence, they seized several devices and three cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, one of them belonging to a Monero wallet. Wilkins' own transaction history showed $382,000 in crypto sent or received, according to the complaint.

  • Victims infected: approximately 8,000
  • Crypto wallets hacked: around 80
  • Estimated theft: at least $220,000
  • Gift cards linked to laundering: more than 150, mostly Uber Eats

Wilkins now faces federal charges of hacking crimes alongside his unnamed co-conspirators. The case is a reminder that consumer gaming platforms are a viable attack surface for targeted crypto theft, especially when the malware ships inside a title that actually works.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.