Okay, so the situation majorly sucks and I hope the victim can somehow reclaim that money.

That said, the headline and article repeatedly call it a ‘verified Steam game’ but at no point do they explain what that means.

As far as I know, the only verification scheme on Steam is Steam Deck Verified, but the screenshot of the offending game’s store page shows that it was rated as ‘Unknown’.

Do they mean verified as in ‘Valve approved it for release’? Surely not, because every Steam game is approved for release so ‘verified Steam game’ would be a tautology.

Either I’m missing something, or this source is just adding meaningless words for no good reason.

The problem was using Cryptocurrency in the first place.

I saw this earlier today, the clip on lsf to be precise.
Modern computing sucks. I remember downloading sketchy shit from astalavista.box.sk (wiki article) all the time, and because of that I had to format c: several times a year. But these days? Scary stuff. Luckily I don't have crypto. And while proton on linux simulates a sandboxed windows environment, there's still free access to root via the Z: drive that wine sets up, so unless one uses the flatpak version which is even more sandboxed, there's still some potential danger there even as a linux user. It's just a matter of when.