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July 21 (UPI) -- Neopets virtual pet website has issued a warning to its 69 million users that their data has possibly been stolen in a hack. "Neopets recently became aware that customer data may have been stolen," the virtual pet website said late Wednesday on Twitter.
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"We immediately launched an investigation assisted by a leading forensics firm. We are also engaging law enforcement and enhancing the protections of our systems and our user data."
"It appears that email addresses and passwords used to access Neopets accounts may have been affected," the thread continued. "We strongly recommend that you change your Neopets password. If you use the same password on other websites, we recommend that you also change those passwords."
The virtual pet website has become popular since it first launched in 1999. The website allows its users to "own virtual pets and buy virtual items for them using virtual currencies," according to Crunchbase.com profile.
A hacker called "TarTarX," started selling the website's data Tuesday for four bitcoins, worth over $90,000, BleepingComputer.com reported.
In October, the virtual pet franchise announced that it was turning its virtual pets into digital assets called non-fungible tokens. More recently, it made its Metaverse debut at one of New York's biggest NFT events, and presented a sneak peek demo of the Metaverse mini-game.
The virtual pet website, which changed owners from Viacom to JumpStart Games in 2014, has dealt with similar security issues in the past.
Neopets had a similar data breach in 2016, and in 2020, independent researcher John Jackson told The Security Ledger that Neopets accounts were up for sale on an online forum, and the website had exposed sensitive data online.
