Did your account get frozen after the Summer Sale?

[Deathlok]

Seen this recently?

"For the protection of the account holder, this purchase has been declined. Further purchasing will be temporarily limited - please contact Steam Support to resolve this issue."

Yesterday, I saw one of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games on sale, and I've wanted those forever. I kept waiting for them to appear during the Summer Sale, but they didn't. So I jumped on the chance to get S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl for five dollars.

At the last moment of my purchase, that message pops up. I was stunned. I thought my credit card company may have put a hold on the card, because it got so much use during the Summer Sale, but I couldn't be sure. The message is so vague, you have no idea what is really going on.

Thank God there's Google.

This is something Vavle does ostensibly for our own protection: Freezing accounts when there is a fury of activity on them, in case said activity is fraudulent. Oddly enough, Valve doesn't do this DURING the Summer Sale, but AFTER it's over. Yeah . . . isn't that peculiar?

I read this happens to anyone who hits a certain dollar amount or number of purchases within a given time frame, and that it may take days for Support to get around to restoring one's purchasing ability. Unfortunately, this often means missing out on whatever sales prompted the declined purchase in the first place.

I could have set up a new Steam account and gifted the purchase to my primary account, because the problem is with Steam, not my credit card. Instead, I walked to the other side of the house and had one of the kids buy the games through his account and gift it to me (of course, I still paid for it with my credit card). Oh, and all the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games were on sale, not just the first one. Hurray!

And then Steam goes down. I tell ya, when it rains....

Eventually, Steam came back up and I was able to accept the gifted games.

But here's the rub: The decline message is entirely vague, so customers are left in the dark as to what is happening. Valve isn't in the customer support business, so it takes some time to get help. Days will pass. Meanwhile, again, customers have nothing but fear and speculation to chew on while they wait. That's craptastic. Valve has to be better at communicating the reasons behind their freezing healthy accounts. Seriously, it's not that difficult to tack on one more sentence of explanation to what you saw, above.

Furthermore, Valve makes no effort to contact customers affected by account holds. No form email. No pop-ups. No phone calls. Nothing that could quickly verify account activity without adversely affecting customer service. Nope, they lock down your account and then deal with your complaint when your turn comes up in the queue.

And the irony is that these account holds take place only once things have slowed down, after the big Summer Sale. If fraud was being commited, I'd say the damage was already done, wouldn't you? It almost seems these holds are done to keep up appearances while not seriously impacting sales. Imagine the outrage if everyone's account was frozen after the first several hours of the Summer Sale. That would make for some very bad press, wouldn't it? But lock down a few random accounts after the sale, and maybe that will discourage fraud in the future? Is that the idea? If so, it's a bad one.

I'm not the first person this has happened to, and I won't be the last.

[Dan loeb]

Wow. Hope it gets fixed, but the timing on that is quite... strange.

[Kirito]

I was and indeed still facing same problem exactly like you.
But somehow, my secondary account which I used to gift the game. s I want to buy to myself bet banned due to fraud.
But seriously, what wrong I have done? I bought the game, I gifted it to my own account. So which rule I have violate??

[valueasset21]

yup , that happen to me also, i have spend more than thousand bucks on summer sale, i send ticket but not have any answer, steam support have worse customer services ever, now my problem is i have coupon that will expired soon, if they not lifted the blocked then its useless to have coupon from crafting badge. hope they can increase they customer services staff, or they to cheap to hire more staff for the customer services, i really regreting to spend money on steam if they keep make customer to wait for long time like this

[ducksonetime]

me too, dunno

[Sloppy Seconds]

Account still working after the sale, no issues.

[TheR9]

Same problem here. I spent a lot of money on gifts and for myself. Talked to my bank and cc is fine, all transactions are fine, no problems at all. Steam should let us know what the hell is going since the message itself is not even clear enough, they should CONTACT US

[william.hartanto]

>_<" frozen here too. I read that they are just worried that big spenders will claim to their card provider that the $1000 purchase was fraudulent; because in that case it will be steam, not VISA/AMEX/MC that pays for the loss.

[harrylipwig]

I am still waiting for a reply from my contacting them. I've been waiting for C&C games to go on sale since the winter sales, saw them Thursday and was really happy, but then couldn't buy them.

[euro_ptr]

ive beenfrozen too and emailed last thursday still no reply :(

[Kickz]

I found I got the same error message as well when I tried updating my wallet to buy trade cards on the market.

I spend very little in the summer sale, about 100-150. Now I topped up my Steam Wallet by 15 Euro and thought ah, spend another 25 Euro and get all my badges to first level for the craic.

But now 25 Euro resulted in the same message.

So basically I spend 150 Euro in a few days during the sale and that's OK but spending 40 on my steam wallet raises alarm bells?

STEAM has all my personal details and is damn well aware of my ye-old age and the authenticity of my PayPal account. If STEAM implies that their payment process is unsafe and open for keylogging viruses or similar to make purchases in my name then I would say STEAM is shooting themselves in the foot here.

Specially if customer support is as bad as stated.

Seriously STEAM? Guess who will be thinking about buying from other vendors in the future!

Like http://www.gog.com/

Same principle as Steam except no client required.

Originally posted by william.hartanto:

>_<" frozen here too. I read that they are just worried that big spenders will claim to their card provider that the $1000 purchase was fraudulent; because in that case it will be steam, not VISA/AMEX/MC that pays for the loss.

To be honest, STEAM just gave me a reason to call my bank and claim that the last 150 euro I spend were not me but someone using my PC thought it was a funny prank to buy all that stuff on my CC.
STEAM even will back me up on that as my account is flagged now, re-enforcing my false claim to be true.

[Deathlok]

The very definition of lousy customer service.

[Deathlok]

OK, gang, here is the form email I received today:

Thank you for contacting Steam Support.

We apologize for the delay.

We are happy that you are enjoying our games and all that Steam has to offer! However, for the protection of the cardholder we do want to verify that you've authorized the recent purchases on your account.

Please respond to this message with the following information, and as soon as we receive confirmation of the charges from you, we will make a note for future reference and unlock your account.

- The Steam account name:

- Complete cardholder billing information (name and billing address):

- Last 4 digits of credit card number (only the last 4 please):

- The type of card (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express):

- Valid daytime phone number including country code (if applicable) or area code:

Thank you for your understanding.

This is in keeping with all I've read about this rather crude system of theirs. AFTER your account has a lot of activity, they may randomly lock it down, and will lift the lock only after you submit a support ticket, they reply, and then you reply with the above information.

It's a lousy, cheap way to do business. A simple phone call would have cleared everything up in mere seconds, rather than days. If that's too expensive, couldn't they send a message through the Steam Client?

Maybe this is how they manage sale prices? Or record profits?

I wish they would do this differently and strive to be more customer-friendly. At the very least, adding this little bit to the original message would lower customer stress levels:

For the protection of the cardholder we do want to verify that you've authorized the recent purchases on your account.

WIth that extra information, customers would know and understand what was happening with their accounts.

Would you agree that is reasonable?

[Kickz]

Originally posted by iamwileecoyote:

OK, gang, here is the form email I received today:

Thank you for contacting Steam Support.

We apologize for the delay.

We are happy that you are enjoying our games and all that Steam has to offer! However, for the protection of the cardholder we do want to verify that you've authorized the recent purchases on your account.

Please respond to this message with the following information, and as soon as we receive confirmation of the charges from you, we will make a note for future reference and unlock your account.

- The Steam account name:

- Complete cardholder billing information (name and billing address):

- Last 4 digits of credit card number (only the last 4 please):

- The type of card (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express):

- Valid daytime phone number including country code (if applicable) or area code:

Thank you for your understanding.

This is in keeping with all I've read about this rather crude system of theirs. AFTER your account has a lot of activity, they may randomly lock it down, and will lift the lock only after you submit a support ticket, they reply, and then you reply with the above information.

It's a lousy, cheap way to do business. A simple phone call would have cleared everything up in mere seconds, rather than days. If that's too expensive, couldn't they send a message through the Steam Client?

Maybe this is how they manage sale prices? Or record profits?

I wish they would do this differently and strive to be more customer-friendly. At the very least, adding this little bit to the original message would lower customer stress levels:

For the protection of the cardholder we do want to verify that you've authorized the recent purchases on your account.

Would you agree that is reasonable?

Complete and utter waste of time. They lock you out from purchasing and then ask you for information the hacker would have!

If a hacker had gotten into your account with steam-guard enabled then the hacker basically was able to hack your steam account, your email account and off course your paypal account.

Assuming the above is a genuine case in which you got hacked and not the 99.99% cases in which a genuine Steam customer is just being annoyed by the silly payment safety system.

How likely is it then that Steam is now communicating with the hacker who already has those details!

Utter waste of time by Steam.

[Deathlok]

Credit card companies will freeze your account, too, but they will also call you. Or wait for a call.

You can't call Steam.

[william.hartanto]

I got that email yesterday, replied to it and still haven't heard anything back - so I created 2 account and just gift myself the game I want using the SAME CREDIT CARD as the banned account. Problem solved. Annoying, pointless, but solved.

I think an easy solution if all they want is my address etc, is to create automated form:

For the protection of the cardholder we do want to verify that you've authorized the recent purchases on your account. Please enter the required information on the form below and submit it to our support department:

- The Steam account name:
- Complete cardholder billing information (name and billing address):
- Last 4 digits of credit card number (only the last 4 please):
- The type of card (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express):
- Valid daytime phone number including country code (if applicable) or area code:

Because at the moment the workflow is like this:
1. You spend a lot of money on steam
2. They reward you by banning you
3. You send a ticket
4. 6 days later someone replied with a copy and pasted email requesting your details
5. You replied, then wait another 6 days (maybe, not there yet) until they come back with 2nd reply...