Last week, the popular online game Among Us was invaded by real scammers, flooding the game's player chat with unsolicited spam messages calling for President Trump's re-election and threatening to hack players if they did not subscribe to the pranksters' YouTube channel.

Among Us creator Inner Sloth's three-person development team quickly responded with a server update on the evening of October 22, followed by a second update two days later. The spam attacks appear to have subsided, but even as late as Monday morning (October 26), occasional reports of new spam were still flying around on Twitter.

For those not familiar with Among Us, it is an online version of the 90s intercollegiate game "Mafia," in which six or more players must work together as a "crew" to run a spaceship, but at least one of them is an "imposter," secretly sabotaging and killing regular crew members That's their job. Games are often open to the public, so they can be played with complete strangers.

Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (R-NY) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (R-MN) played "Among Us" live on Twitch, attracting over 400,000 viewers.

The modus operandi of pranksters using the pseudonym "Eris Loris" (apparently a reference to the Greek goddess of chaos and small, lazy primates) to infect "Among Us" in in-game chat has yet to be determined exactly.

Players use this chat to converse with each other and try to deduce who the "impostor" among them is. However, Eris Loris somehow hijacks players' accounts and forces them to send messages with the same content." Subscribe to Eris Loris on YouTube (or we will hack your device)," followed by a Discord address, a shortened URL, and the words "TRUMP 2020."

The shortened URL led to sites selling cheats for popular games such as Counter-Strike Source, Apex Legends, and Garry's Mod. There seems to be no truth to the threat that Elise Loris will "hack your device."

"I was curious to see what would happen, and I personally thought it was funny," a person claiming to be Eris Loris told Kotaku. If you care about the game and are willing to spam some random guy on the Internet into hating you because you can't play for three minutes, that's silly."

At the peak of the attacks, Inner Sloth's Twitter account recommended playing only private games or only with players you know and trust. Now that the threat appears to have largely passed, Among Us developer Forest Willard tweeted that banning troublesome players like Eris Loris would be effective.