Steam Trading Error (Items given to the wrong account?!?!?! Wtf mobile authenticator)

[Staz]

Okay, so here's the situation. I'm sending a bunch of my expensive dota items to a friend as a gift. I sent a trade offer to him, and it required confirmation thru the mobile authenticator.

I confirmed the trade in my phone, and it says in my pc that the trade was accepted, but was canceled on his for some apparent reason. It felt a bit weird at first, but I thought the items would reappear in a few mins.

About half an hour long of waiting, I got worried cuz the items never reappeared in either of our inventories. I went to my trade offers history, and I clicked on the profile of who I traded with.

To my dismay, I saw that it apparently was a different profile with the exact same name as my friend with the exact same profile picture.

Wtf is going on? I CLEARLY sent my trade offer to MY FRIEND and no one else, I only confirmed it with the mobile authenticator, and then all of a sudden it's given to another account?

Valve?

Anyways, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts because I had about 100 USD worth of items.

Also, it'd be great if someone told me how to contact steam directly through email or whatever.

[B-o-B]

Do Not Trade
Scan for Malware/virus https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/
Deauthorize all devices https://store.steampowered.com/twofactor/manage
Change your Account password on a secure device.
Generate new back up codes.
Revoke the API key https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey
Stop logging into 3rd party sites please.

Account Security
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1266-OAFV-8478&l=

Steam Item Restoration Policy
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9958-MJDG-3003

[Jerry]

To explain a bit further, what has happened to you: After you entered your login into a fake Steam login page, a bot was put into your account. This bot waited for you to set up a trade with valuable items, then canceled it, changed the name and avatar of a sockpuppet account to look like your intended receiver and sent a trade to this one instead. You confirmed it on your mobile authenticator (I suppose; I haven't seen the scheme working against email users yet), assuming the warnings shown (this user is not a friend of yours, has changed his name recently, has the same name as somebody from your friends list) were a mistake.
This scheme has been going on for about a year, with about 5 victims showing up in this forum per day.

The steps above are to lock out the bot from your account for now.
As has been said, Steam does not do item duplications anymore and has never been doing trade reverses. If you feel safer with time to check an ongoing trade, consider changing to email confirmation, which gives you a two weeks window to cancel a trade that may contain a mistake.

For the future, remember not to log into any websites directly with your Steam login. Instead do the login on the main page of Steam (bookmark it or use search engines; there's fake Steam phishing sites too). Legitimate websites will carry over the login and only ask you to confirm that the account is yours without asking for your name or password.

[Staz]

Originally posted by Jerry:

To explain a bit further, what has happened to you: After you entered your login into a fake Steam login page, a bot was put into your account. This bot waited for you to set up a trade with valuable items, then canceled it, changed the name and avatar of a sockpuppet account to look like your intended receiver and sent a trade to this one instead. You confirmed it on your mobile authenticator (I suppose; I haven't seen the scheme working against email users yet), assuming the warnings shown (this user is not a friend of yours, has changed his name recently, has the same name as somebody from your friends list) were a mistake.
This scheme has been going on for about a year, with about 5 victims showing up in this forum per day.

The steps above are to lock out the bot from your account for now.
As has been said, Steam does not do item duplications anymore and has never been doing trade reverses. If you feel safer with time to check an ongoing trade, consider changing to email confirmation, which gives you a two weeks window to cancel a trade that may contain a mistake.

For the future, remember not to log into any websites directly with your Steam login. Instead do the login on the main page of Steam (bookmark it or use search engines; there's fake Steam phishing sites too). Legitimate websites will carry over the login and only ask you to confirm that the account is yours without asking for your name or password.

Does this mean that I'll no longer be able to retrieve the items I traded off? :/

[FFL2and3rocks]

Yes, all trades are final.

[Jerry]

Originally posted by FunZy!:

Does this mean that I'll no longer be able to retrieve the items I traded off? :/

Yup. As far as Valve/Steam is concerned, you handed the items to somebody as a gift and at least sort of conciously confirmed the fact. Your only hope would be to personally force the thief to hand back your items before he ships them to his main account and turns them into money (physical violence appears to be the most promising way), and we propably agree, that this is rather difficult to achieve.
The system will be gamed in one way or another. Reversions or duplications would only shift the misuse to a different area. And as Valve does not like providing any form of customer support, leaving the problem on the user side spares them the effort.

As I said, you are far from the first one to have this happen to them (several users already got the fix prewritten to simply copy/paste it), and you'll certainly not be the last. The latest in a long row of schemes to steal things on Steam, and there's already several variations of it (like profile edits to warn of an "incoming ban", suggesting to send all inventory items to a safe account or friend).

Might be a good idea to visit the forum every couple of weeks to see, if there's a new trick going around. Otherwise, I think I have said all there is to say already.

[Staz]

Alright, that's quite unfortunate, thanks guys. Atleast I know how it works now :)

[Mikasa Ackerman]

Originally posted by FunZy!:

Alright, that's quite unfortunate, thanks guys. Atleast I know how it works now :)

always double check the trade in the mobile auth. if you arent friends with someone , or a person changed their name recently , the authentificator points that out

[LongDongDemon69]

This just happened to me as well. The only difference is that I did verify it was my friend I was trading to. Once he never got the trade offer I looked further into it and that friend was blocked on my account and the trade went to an account I have never seen before. An account that had never changed its name to mimic my friend’s profile and had a completely different picture. How that happened I have no idea.

[John]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.