Apex streamer is kidnapped by hacker – EA reacts… not at all?

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A known hacker digitally kidnapped streamer “Camms” and held her captive in the Apex Legends practice lobby. The confused streamer shares the incident on Twitter, but EA seems little interested.

While a streamer was playing a normal round of Apex Legends with her friends,  she suddenly lost connection to her game and ended up in the Battle Royales practice area. With her in the group: an unknown player who had apparently digitally “kidnapped” her.

What happened?

The streamer “Camms” (approx. 35,000 followers) was playing a round of Apex with her friends. In the middle of the round, she suddenly lost the connection to her lobby and found herself on the training range of the game. Shortly afterwards, a player she didn’t know joined and simply wrote the word “owned” in the in-game chat.

“Owned” means something like “to possess” in English and is usually written when one has defeated or humiliated an opponent. He then disappeared from the lobby again, leaving the confused streamer speechless.

Hacker is well known in the Apex community

The streamer shared the clip of the incident on Twitter. In the comments, the player, who calls himself “autismgaming999” in-game, is quickly recognised as a well-known hacker and Apex leaker. He is said to be famous for releasing information about Respawn Entertainment’s game early on.

How did EA react to the clip?

In the post in which Camms shares the incident, the streamer tagged the Apex Legends game and security analyst Conor Ford from developer studio Respawn Entertainment. However, neither of these have yet commented on the incident. The only official feedback Camms received came from the Twitter account “EA Help”.

However, this account was also unable to help the streamer. On the contrary: “EA Help” had the unhelpful tip to simply post the incident in their help forum. The worst thing about it? EA dismissed the hacker attack as a simple bug.

Apparently, the developer is having a hard time acknowledging that there might be a small security issue in Apex Legends. Under Camms’ tweet, some Apex players report similar incidents in which they or their friends were kicked out of the lobby for no reason.

It is unlikely that such attacks always involve the same hacker, but such incidents are obviously not an isolated case. Cheaters are also a plague in Apex Legends, making the gaming experience miserable for many.

Apex’s unreliable anti-cheat system has been criticised for a long time and even professional players are showing increasing frustration.

It remains to be seen whether Respawn Entertainment will comment personally on the clip of Camms and the general criticism of the “bad” anti-cheat system. In any case, fans of the game have been calling for a thorough update of the anti-cheat software for quite some time.