I generally don’t do articles on Steam scams.
Normally I don’t run articles on account phishing techniques, but this one has been blowing up my inbox and evidently has become an epidemic on Steam. I’m sure it exists on other platforms but since MMO Fallout is generally Steam-oriented I’ve been seeing this a lot recently.
The way that this scam works is a random person will get in touch with you somehow and profusely apologize that they accidentally reported your Steam account. The report is usually for item scamming or duplicating, or something of that nature. They then inform you that a Steam Admin (of course) told them (why) that they will delete your account within 24 hours unless you reach out to someone (again why are they telling the reporter this) and verify your account.
Now what happens here can go one of two ways. The person you have to reach out to, a completely legitimate Steam admin, either requires you to hand over your login credentials, or they may have you trade items to a bot to “verify their legitimacy.” In the trade case you are told that the items will be checked and traded back to you. You will never get those items back. Alternately they may threaten to ban your account unless you pay some sum to remove it.
Obviously none of this is true. Valve will never have you do any of this to “verify” your account. There are so many official ways to verify your ownership with Steam that all of these techniques should bring up major red flags. Unfortunately these scammers use timeliness and panic to basically offset a person’s normal common sense and suspicions.
Let’s mark some things down:
- A Valve employee wouldn’t need you to trade your items to verify them, they’d have internal tools to test that.
- A Valve employee wouldn’t need your account information, they have internal tools to check your account.
- Valve wouldn’t give you 24 hours notice before they ban your account, they’d just ban it and deal with it on appeal.
- Valve would never pre-emptively notify the person who reported you that they are going to ban your account or have them reach out to you to contact Valve. That line of logic is stupid.
- Valve wouldn’t start a ticking clock to ban you because one person accidentally reported an account they’ve never interacted with.
If you step back and think about it, none of the aspects of the scam make sense. Again this is where we get into the idea of time limits and panic overtaking common sense. Another thing these scam artists like to do is to take over accounts, meaning you’re probably going to get this message from someone on your friends list. That makes it look more legitimate.
It still isn’t. You can report your friend for their account being compromised and if you know how to contact them outside of Steam then do that and let them know. Otherwise stop emailing me about this phishing scam. Please and thank you.
Happy Sunday.
MMO Fallout 