In an extended Reddit post on the Origin subreddit on Wednesday, a self-described Apex Legends "whale" who goes by the name Karankhushalani on Reddit accused an EA employee of abusing their access within EA to repeatedly break into his account, even after repeated attempts to recover it. Additionally, he showed screenshots of the alleged thief harassing him on Discord. Further, Karan claimed that this is not an isolated incident either.

According to the Reddit post, earlier this week Karan met a player on EU servers who requested to see his account in Discord. Karan showed the account on a Discord stream, without showing any account information. When Karan returned, he says that he found his account in use and that the guy had blocked him.

He recovered his account through EA support, something that he says he has done many times, but then the alleged account thief changed the email back, causing the recovery effort to fail. Karan further alleges that the thief added him back on Discord again, and told him to "let me know when you are done talking to Yaman" who was the support EA support representative that Karan was working with. The thief at this point claimed to be working at EA.

According to Karan, he made repeated attempts to recover the account, with it being lost each time almost immediately upon recovery. This is in spite of attempting various fixes, including using a different laptop, checking for malware on his original laptop, and having a rep recover the account without activating it, but each time Karan claims that his account was stolen again only moments after the recovery.

At this point, the thief also allegedly contacted Karan and started "meme-ing [Karan] again." Based on the chat logs provided in the Reddit post, the alleged EA employee called him repeatedly, harassed him in the chat, and then apparently banned the account briefly, before unbanning it a few minutes later.

At this point, Karan said that even the EA representative was starting to believe him that someone inside EA was abusing his access to carry out this harassment/thievery. Karan reports that EA has escalated the situation to a special security team, and will offer updates later this week.

According to Karan, this is likely happening to others as well, as a "friend of a friend" allegedly had the same person message them and claims to have found other threads of people dealing with the same issue.

While hacking itself is very common in Apex and other online games, especially for high-value accounts like Karan's, which Karan claimed is valued at over $3,000, the idea of someone within the company stealing and selling accounts is alarming, to say the least. We will keep this story updated as we learn more about this situation.