A vast quantity of CSGO skins, reportedly worth $700,000 USD (£578,000 GBP) has been hacked and stolen from popular Counter-Strike trading site CSGOEXO, which is currently offline as it attempts to recover the items from Steam and Valve. It comes as the FPS game surges in popularity, with CSGO beating its own record for concurrent players twice in the same month – promising signs ahead of the rumoured Counter-Strike 2 release date.
If you’re unfamiliar with the world of CSGO skins and trading, the shooter essentially has its own digital economy, whereby in-game items like weapon designs and stickers are bought and sold by players, often for incredibly high prices.
The prices of weapon skins in CSGO are based around their rarity and ‘float’ value – essentially a measure of how often they have actually been used in the game. A skin with 0.00 float is the most valuable, since it is essentially unused – imagine buying a rare action figure and never taking it out of the box. 1.00 float skins are the most worn, and, as such, the least valuable.
One CSGO skin, the ‘Karambit Hardened Case Blue Gem’ for the game’s combat knife, is reportedly worth around $1,500,000 USD (£1,238,000 GBP). A version of M4 ‘Howl’ skin, pictured below, was sold in 2020 for $100,000 USD (£82,000 GBP).
Counter-Strike skins are traded between players using various sites and platforms. CSGOEXO is one such trading post, and now says it has been the victim of a hack, with intruders stealing $700,000 worth of CSGO skins.
“The CSGOEXO.COM website is temporarily down,” a disclaimer on the site’s frontpage reads, “as unfortunately $700,000 worth of skins were illegally stolen from the site in the early hours of February 15. We’ll do our best to restore the normal functioning of the website. We have already contacted Steam.”
The owners of the site also claim to have identified the perpetrators of the hack, providing links to the Steam profiles of three different people. CSGOEXO does not specify which skins have been stolen, nor does it provide a time or date for when the site may be restored, meaning users are currently locked out of their accounts and unable to trade.
It comes as CSGO soars in popularity on Steam. On February 11, the shooter broke its all-time record for concurrent users, with 1,302,219 players logging in at the same time. Just over a week later, on February 19, that record was broken again, with CSGO measuring 1,324,800 concurrent users. Promising signs for the future, especially with the rumoured Counter-Strike 2 release da
If you’re a big CSGO fan, you might want to check out some of the other best free Steam games. You can also pick up the greatest free shooting games on PC.