trade scam?

[howitzer]

this morning i went to trade all of my skins to my friend for her birthday. i sent her the trade offer as a gift and told her to check her steam. she said that the trade notification popped up but when she opened her phone it was gone. i then went to my trade history and saw that the trade was canceled and then sent to someone who i’m not even friends with and have never heard of before. steam support hasn’t replied and i’m just over it.

[Wolf Knight]

your account is compromised


Steps to take NOW:
1. Scan for malware https://www.malwarebytes.com/
2. Deauthorize all other devices https://store.steampowered.com/twofactor/manage
3. Change passwords from a clean computer
4. Generate new backup codes for your Mobile App
5. Revoke the API key https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey (there should be nothing in the APIKEY)


Please review how you are logging into Steam, you somehow gave them your log in information. This could of been due to the computer being compromised and redirecting to a fake login, or you using a 3rd party site to login to steam.

Once you are sure you have regained control, you can start trading again. Please triple check any trades you make to be sure they are going to the correct account.

After you have secured the account, please edit your profile back to normal (if it was altered by the hijacker/scammer)

your items are gone, support will not restore them.

[howitzer]

its absolutely ridiculous.

[Wolf Knight]

Originally posted by JAYDO:

its absolutely ridiculous.

that you gave away your log in? we see this multiple times a day. did you do everything in the list I posted? if you didnt, who ever you gave away your log in to may still be able to use the account without your knowledge or permission. and they will use it to spam your friends to try and compromise them.

[Jerry]

Well, you got the notifications on your authenticator, that the person you were trading with is not a friend of yours, has recently changed their name and has the same name as somebody from your friends list.
You were not completely without warning about this issue.

Known hijacking method, has been going on for about a year. I'd say roughly five threads like yours per day. There might be ways to prevent this (my suggestion would be to limit outgoing trades to one per 15 seconds), but it's propably not on top of Valves list.
Do not do Steam logins on websites anymore. Instead do your login on the main page of Steam (bookmark it or use a search engine). Legitimate sites will carry it over and not ask for your name and password.

[howitzer]

i got no notifications. i confirmed the trade to my friend and that's all. when i told her to look, she got the notification, and then when she got on the steam app, she said she never got it. i then went back and it said the trade was canceled and sent to some random account that i wasn't friends with. that's why i'm so confused. i don't give out my steam password, in fact, i change it often to prevent this. i'm just so confused because i never confirmed that random person on my authenticator. it makes no sense whatsoever.

[Teksura]

What happened is your account became compromised, most likely through a third party site. This well known scam then requires you to authorize the trade giving your items away after you allow them access to your account through either malware, or giving away your details through a phishing fake login page or other trick used by those shady third party sites.

The way it does this is after it gains access to your account, a bot waits until you send out a trade offer, and then using the access you gave to them, their bot cancels the trade, changes a bot account to match the name and profile picture of the person you wanted to trade with, and then sends a trade giving your stuff away for free.

The scam depends on you ignoring all the warnings, such as "this user is not on your friends list", "this user has a similar name to someone on your friends list", their items missing from the offer, the big "you will receive nothing" text, the fact that they have the wrong level, wrong "has been on Steam since" date (usually obviously too recent to make sense), and a few other obvious warnings. It only works if you're not even looking at what you're doing. Sadly, an awful lot of people don't care enough to verify the trade is what they are expecting, so this scam continues to work.

Valve will not return items you gifted away to the scammer as a result of ignoring all the warnings. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9958-MJDG-3003


Now, the best thing you can do is stop arguing and secure your account as you have been instructed to do. Unless you want to lose more items by giving them away to a bot.

[howitzer]

i understand what you are saying. and i have "secured my account as i have been instructed to do" so you can stop giving me an attitude.