Random Bot-Scammers adding me to friends list on a daily basis

[Zabito Boga]

First of all, I'm not sure whether this is the correct place for this kind of thread or not, so apologies in advance if it's not!

-------

Lately I have been getting quite annoyed with Steam because I'm getting friend invites every single day by people whom I have never seen before.

The problem is that these people are all scammers/bots advertising their phishing websites leading to a fake steam link. I have not clicked any of those because I do not know what I may find there, but it sure is annoying as hell. Lately I have just been blocking every person who adds me, which is really bad because I have a few trade threads open and people may, sometimes, add me to negotiate or something, and because of that, I don't get to know whether it was a real person with a genuine offer or another one of these stupid bots.

Is there anything I can do at all? This is very frustrating!

[Nickolaus]

Sometimes you'll encounter legitimate accounts requesting you to add them that are unfortunately people who have been phished. The other accounts that are level 0 and sometimes have the name [unassigned] are some of the accounts you should familiarize yourself with. Those accounts that are named those are likely phishers.

I personally use trading sites. The only option I can think of is either opening your profile up to comments, or posting your trade offer link publicly. I'd also consider only adding people you know as well.

[Aesthetic]

I never get those friend requests. You only get them because you put your name out there to Steam trading sites.

[Zabito Boga]

These bots have avatars and "normal names". Names that I would expect someone to use, actually. They usually have their profile set to private and they always own ONE "random" game. They even have other friends (people who may have accepted them just like I had been).

What gives?


Oh and by the way, I only ever post on threads from the steam forums, including steam game forums. I have never joined any website and left my name there.

[Nickolaus]

A random game could be a registered game that is F2P. There's ways of "boosting" your registered game library number. I see no reason for someone to do that, but it's out there.

What it sounds like is they're using names of other people. You just really cannot do much about phishing attacks. You'll never be able to fully stop it, just like you receiving spam mail constantly. Sure, filters exist, but those are not fail proof.

[Big Al]

There's nothing you can do except deny and block all friends requests. Valve does not care; they've abandoned their community to Russian scammers and bot accounts.

Take a look at the comments on the official Steam groups like Steam Universe. Hundreds and hundreds of scam and phishing links in Cyrillic. Keep in mind that these are groups that are moderated by Valve employees themselves - yet the mods do nothing.

This is the new Steam, a dumping ground of half-finished games and a community overrun by scammers and bots. It's sad.