Is Fortnite going to be hacked on July 6th?

At this point you may have heard about a conspiracy theory going around about a hacker coming to Fortnite on July 6th.

This supposed “antisnow” hacker is saying they are going to erase all skins from some Fortnite accounts and give other accounts a full inventory.

Spoiler: They aren’t. This is a weird conspiracy being fueled by clickbait YouTube channels to drum up drama and views for their channels.

The primary YouTuber who has been capitalizing off (and probably created) this ‘hacker’ is Landon. In the early days of Fortnite, he used to have videos that often topped one million views and sometimes reached as high as five million.

But over the last four months, before he began with his antisnow videos, he only cracked a million viewers on one video out of over 50. Most of his videos were between 100,000 and 300,000 views.

If you’re curious why this matters, that’s motivation to create a fake conspiracy. His channel was losing viewers and he was making less money.

So along comes this ‘antisnow’ character and now he is basically scaring viewers into watching his videos because they don’t want their accounts to be deleted.

If a hacker actually had the ability to erase or provide full inventories, they definitely would not make vague threats to a struggling YouTuber. They would contact Epic Games and get paid for it. Game companies reward players who identify flaws in their security, especially ones as huge as what antisnow is claiming.

They could easily get a fat payday if they could do what they claim they can do.

Why you don’t need to worry about your Fortnite account being hacked on July 6th

Besides the reasons listed above, namely that this is a publicity stunt from a struggling YouTuber, Epic Games PR rep Nick Chester has already publicly come out and said nothing is happening.

This is ridiculous and not true.

— Nick Chester (@nickchester) July 2, 2019

I have no idea why ITalkFortnite, a reasonably well known account with 35,000 followers, framed the question like that but at least it got a response from Nick.

Unfortunately that isn’t exactly what ‘antisnow’ was claiming, so Nick’s statement could be true without fully debunking the hackers claims.

Still, there is nothing to worry about. I did reach out to Nick for an official word but he is also in the midst of his two week vacation along with the rest of Epic Games staff…