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“Hamster” Cryptocurrency Craze Takes Over Iran Amid Crumbling Economy
Taxi drivers and motorcyclists tap furiously on their mobile phones as they wait at red lights in the Iranian capital during an early June heat wave. Some pedestrians in Tehran are doing the same. Everyone believes they could get rich.
The object of their rapt attention? The “Hamster Kombat” app.
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Even as presidential candidates promise to restore the country’s economy, Iranians, who have been hearing about bitcoin for years, are now flocking to this app in the pure hope that it will one day bear fruit, without knowing much about who it is. ‘and behind.
“It’s a sign of desperation, honestly,” said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group and an expert on Iran. It’s about “trying to hold on to anything you have a little hope that might one day turn into something precious.”
Those able to divest from holdings in Iran’s currency, the rial, have purchased property, artwork, vehicles, precious metals and other material assets since the collapse of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
At the time of the agreement, the exchange rate was 32,000 rials for 1 dollar. Today it approaches 580,000 rials to the dollar – and many have found that the value of their bank accounts, pension funds and other holdings has been weakened by years of rapid depreciation.
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Meanwhile, prices of fruit and vegetables have increased by 50% compared to last year, while the price of meat has increased by 70%. The cost of a shared taxi ride, common in the Iranian capital, has almost doubled. Rides on Tehran’s subway, still the cheapest option for the city’s commuters, also increased by about 30%.
“Since morning I have had three visitors in my shop, none of them bought anything,” said Mohammad Reza Tabrizi, who runs a clothing store in central Tehran. “Most customers prefer to buy from street vendors or used items in other places.”
In underground passages and other areas of the city, street vendors sell almost anything they can get their hands on. It is this desperate environment that has seen increased public interest in cryptocurrencies and mobile games that offer coins.
The proliferation of smartphones across Iran, as well as the relatively low cost of mobile service compared to other nations, make access to apps like “Hamster Kombat” attractive.
The app is accessed via the Telegram messaging app, which remains popular in Iran despite authorities’ efforts to block access. It works like an incremental or “clicker” game: users repeatedly click on an object or complete repetitive tasks to earn points.
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In “Hamster Kombat,” users believe they can access a supposed cryptocurrency associated with the game that has not yet been publicly traded.
In an email, people describing themselves as the game’s developers declined to answer questions about their identities or business plans, but insisted that they were “not offering any cryptocurrency in the game.”
“We are educating our audience about cryptocurrencies through game mechanics,” the email states.
However, the game resembles another app that once offered cryptocurrency to Iranians – and it seems that just the promise of what could be free money could drive some Iranians to distraction.
Online jokes show a man touching a tombstone as if it were a cell phone. Another uses a massage gun to quickly poke an on-screen hamster.
But the public’s interest in the game has also attracted the attention of the authorities.
Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, deputy head of Iran’s military, described the app as part of the West’s “soft war” against Iran’s theocracy ahead of the election.
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(Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File photo)
“One of the characteristics of the enemy’s soft war is the game of ‘Hamster,’” Sayyari said, according to state news agency IRNA. He theorized that the “enemy” is popularizing the game so that people will be distracted and not “pay attention to the plans of the presidential candidates.”
“Then (people) fail to choose the best candidates,” Sayyari said. Hardline experts in Iran have expressed similar views.
The JameJam newspaper, published by Iranian state television, also warns that the ever-increasing interest in the game is a sign of “the dream of becoming rich overnight and accumulating wealth effortlessly.” Players are said to range from “builders, mechanics and refrigerator repairers to colleagues and classmates at university.”
“A society that instead of working and trying to succeed and earn money relies on these games and looks for shortcuts and windfalls, gradually loses the culture of effort and entrepreneurship and shifts towards convenience,” the newspaper said, without recognizing that the country’s economic problems were potentially driving interest in the app.
The app has even caught the attention of a 97-year-old Shiite religious scholar, Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, known for his fatwas declaring things “haram” or “forbidden” from his office in the holy city of Qom. Iran’s center of Shia learning, filled with religious schools and revered shrines.
Calling the cryptocurrency “the source of a lot of abuse,” Shirazi said people should not use the “Hamster Kombat” app or similar ones involving bitcoin.
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Bitcoin
(Photo: Shutterstock)
Iran is not alone in having concerns about the game.
Ukrainian authorities, locked in a devastating war with Iran-armed Russia since Moscow’s 2022 invasion, have warned that user data remains stored in Russia and could potentially put it at risk.
Then there is the broader risk of exposure to malware as consumers in Iran often cannot legally purchase new software or even access legitimate app stores. They also run the risk of state-sponsored hackers targeting them for their political views.
Meanwhile, as Iran’s election campaign continues, presidential candidates are using Instagram, X and Telegram, all services previously banned by the theocracy after a series of nationwide protests.
“As long as you are able to pay the price, everything is available,” said Rashidi, the Iran expert.