Users of the Chess.com were surprised today to find out that their previously played games could be minted on a blockchain as part of an NFT grift. Chess.com has an announcement about the scam, and the only way to opt-out of having previously played games minted is buried at the end of a support document linked from the announcement (that’s an archive.org link, the live page is here). According to the support page, users are required to contact Chess.com support to opt-out or their opponents can mint their games as NFTs. When I tried to opt-out just now for my Chess.com account, the button to “Contact Us” did not work in the Safari web browser, I had to use Vivaldi.
According to chess.com:
Treasure Chess is a place for chess and crypto fans to turn their games into unique “Treasures” to collect, share, trade, and sell. You can mint any of the games you played on Chess.com into a Treasure, which will then exist as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) on the Polygon Network.
Any of these things could happen without engaging in cryptocurrency or NFT scams by using a technology invented decades ago called a database. By using a database you can also back up the system and protect against the scams and fraud which happen every day with cryptocurrency and NFTs.
The Chess.com support site says I’ll hear back in 1-2 business days about my request to opt-out of letting the games I played in the past become NFTs. I’ll be very surprised if they’re able to keep up with the volume of people opting out within that time frame. I didn’t play there much, but now I have no intention of ever playing a game using Chess.com again.
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