U.S. agency that goes after banks also wants to protect gamers from theft and fraud

There has been strong bipartisan interest on gaming issues, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says.

Photo: Vladimir Solomianyi, Unsplash

An abundance of complaints from the American public in recent years has led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a division of the U.S. federal government focused primarily on protecting people from mistreatment by banks and other money lenders, to look more closely at the video game industry.

Those rumblings have also helped motivate a new proposal from the Bureau, announced earlier this month, to grant American gamers the same anti-fraud protections for certain video game accounts that they already have for their ATM cards.

“Video games got on our radar when we began to notice that there was an increase in activity by video game companies that was, what we like to call, ‘drifting into banking,’” a CFPB official told Game File in an interview last week.