The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a United States government agency charged with protecting consumers from unfair and deceptive practices from banks and financial institutions, proposed a new measure that would protect Roblox users from scams and hacks on Friday. The agency is also asking players who spend virtual currency for their feedback in better understanding any challenges they’ve faced, including how a company reacted when they reported a scam.
The proposed measure isn’t a new law; it would reinterpret preexisting regulation called the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. Originally passed in 1978 by the late President Jimmy Carter, the EFTA was created to protect consumers from unwanted debit transactions when people started using ATMs. The CFPB would like to extend the rule of the EFTA so that it applies to certain video game game platforms, like Roblox.
“The ways in which these gaming currencies and accounts work is evolving rapidly, including to function more and more like banking and payment systems,” a blog post from the agency said.
“As this evolution has occurred, gamers—or in some cases their parents and guardians—have reported issues such as trouble when converting dollars to in-game currency, unauthorized transactions, account hacks and takeovers, theft, scams, and loss of assets. They have also described receiving limited to no help from gaming companies and the banks or digital wallets involved. Refunds are often denied, people are finding their gaming accounts suspended by the video game company after a player tries to get a refund from their financial institution, or people are left caught in doom loops with AI-powered customer service representatives while they’re just trying to get straight answers.”
The law wouldn’t apply to every game with in-game currencies and transactions but focuses on those with a monetized virtual marketplace shared between users, like Roblox. The language from the proposed law lists three features as criteria, “paying for goods or services from multiple merchants, ability to withdraw funds or obtain cash, or conducting person-to-person transfers.”
On Roblox, its users can purchase currency called Robux. Individual users often use that money to buy in-game perks and cosmetics from other users. In turn, Roblox developers earn a portion of Robux spent on items and games they create and can exchange Robux into U.S. dollars via the Developer Exchange Program. The rule might not impact a game like Fortnite, where users can’t resell cosmetic items or transfer V-bucks between each other and exchange of services.
The regulation has the potential to impact millions of users on a platform where kids can be tricked via scams and individual developers collectively rake in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. To that end, this is a new rule and the CFPB is actively interested in learning more about what consumers think. So if you have some thoughts about what the agency can do to better support users, you can reach out to the CFPB via the instructions on its blog. The CFPB said the public comment period will last until March 31, after which the agency will use that feedback to create its final ruling.
The post The US government wants to start protecting you from Robux scams appeared first on Polygon.
