Steam game pulled from store after allegations of cryptocurrency mining

There’s been an unfortunate increase in the amount of illegitimate games on Steam. Last September, Valve removed almost 200 “fake” games from Silicon Echo Studios — cheaply made games that developers made to cut a quick profit by taking advantage of the Steam Direct program and the trading card system.

The latest title to come under fire, however, reportedly had a more nefarious scheme in mind: turning players’ computers into cryptocurrency miners. The game is called Abstractism, which was said to not only infiltrate players’ computers with mining software, but also dupe them through falsified items on the Steam Marketplace. But not long after these accusations started circulating, it has been taken off Steam.

When Abstractism was up on the store, it was marketed as a “relaxing” platformer with a simple design. But YouTuber SidAlpha noticed that something was afoot, when someone on the Team Fortress 2 forums posted about how the game was tied into an item scam….