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Buff claims to reward you with gift cards or other tools if you play games with their app opened.
This sounds like a “too good to be true” scam so I decided to investigate.?
They offer points per game you play. The more and longer you play, the more points you get.
1200 points are needed for a $10 gift card (this is the lowest reward). but you only get around 4 - 5 points a game which means you need to play 240 games to get a $5-10 gift card!
The better you do inside the game the more points you get but still, you need to play tens of hours to get your $10 gift card.
The app looks professional and structured. English is good, no non-working pages. The site is 4 years old and this also gets confirmed by their Facebook which shows the same data.
The .game extension is an expensive domain name, costing several hundreds of dollars per year. It is not often used by scammers.
Finally Buff has an Alexa rank of 33067 which is very high.
Buff gives away all kinds of items from gift cards to keyboards to computer mice. They also seem to advertise a lot on Youtube and other social media channels. That's in general not cheap. So how do they make money?
They do not show banners, do not ask a subscription fee, do not seem to be selling your data or misusing your computer for the things they warn about on their own home page; malware, virusses and cryptomining
So what is their business model? To get an answer, we contacted their CEO via LinkedIn. Within a day we got the following reply:
"Buff built a loyalty program for gamers, a platform for desktop and mobile, rewarding gamers based on their in-game achievements through Buff Points. With the points users are earning, they are able to redeem them in the Buff marketplace for gaming goods, such as new games, skins, gift cards and much more.
We have a few revenue streams, ads- showing targeted ads to users before/after they are playing games (similar to YouTube/Instagram business model), we have monthly paid subscription plans (similar to Spotify revenue model), in addition, we are tournaments/events for brands on our platform, here is an example: https://www.buff.game/hulu-challenge/."
Buff.game has quite a lot of reviews on Trustpilot (more than 3000). This is suspicious because at the end of March, they had just below 60 reviews and now they have almost 3200!
Their reviews spiked in April 2022 mostly positive. Did Buff.game buy reviews or just promote it to their large fan base?
Which organization is behind this? Where are they based? It is a pity they do not provide this information transparently on their website. However, on Linkedin they are easy to find.
The team is definitely based in Israel we can see this by going to their LinkedIn and their Facebook. Their CEO also informed us that Buff Technologies is a publicly-traded company (source: Tase, Bloomberg, Calcalistech).
I think Buff is legit. However, you have to work very hard to get any of the rewards. Also I still have doubts about how they make money. Until we have a clearer answer to that, we recommend being very cautious with installing their software on your computer.
