A certain user under the nickname Steam Help has been known in the gaming community for some time. It was said about him that he is connected with someone in Steam support and thanks to this he can get data from any account. In a series of videos dedicated to this case, YouTuber Mzkshow mentions that some players turned to Steam Help for help in restoring their game profile, and he, as confirmation of his capabilities, sent them account information that could not be obtained in any other way.
However, recently about the activities of this person, whose real name remains unknown, new information has emerged. It turned out that Steam Help was not an intermediary, but was a support employee. He conspired with another person who appears in the Mzkshow video as Alexander, and they used the existing mechanism for restoring access to the account for their own purposes.
How did the fraudulent scheme work?
By contacting Steam support, the user can regain access to his profile, even if he has lost access to the mail to which he was linked. To do this, you need to confirm your identity and provide as much detailed information as possible, for example, the first key that was activated on your account. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where two people are trying to gain access to an account – scammer and rightful owner. Each of them tries to prove that the account belongs to him by providing some information. Most likely, support will give priority to the one who provides more information.
It is this mechanism that used Steam Help and Alexander. Fraudsters targeted accounts that had expensive items in their inventory. At the same time, they selected those profiles that had been inactive for many days or had once changed ownership. Using Steam Help account data, they went through the procedure of restoring access, after which they sold items and deleted the account. The amount they managed to withdraw in this way during the year amounted to more than 320 thousand dollars.
In the illustration below – an example of what a window with user information might look like in the interface of a support employee.
In addition, it turned out that these two scammers – are not the only ones who used a similar mechanism. Mzkshow notes that at some point Alexander and Steam encountered “competitors” - someone managed to withdraw items from the accounts they had designated as their goals before they themselves could do it.
What did Valve?
The existence of such a scheme was possible due to the way the support of Steam is organized. Due to the fact that the number of players is extremely large and they are located in different time zones, Valve outsources the resolution of all typical issues, and the second level of support (Valve directly) deals only with atypical and complex situations. It was in one of these outsourcing companies that Steam Help worked. This can be indirectly confirmed by the fact that, according to Mzkshow, Valve recently severed relations with one of the outsourcers, and a number of employees were fired from there. The blogger suggests that it could be the company CPL.
Even if users noticed that something suspicious was happening to their account, they were unable to dispute the loss of items and regain access, since the information that the scammers could provide to support was always more complete. This happened until they tried to take away access from a user who himself had some kind of connection with Valve. As a result, he managed to get his account back, and a check was carried out at the outsourcing company.
Most of the skins that the scammers managed to get ended up with collectors, including, for example, Anomaly. And one of the items featured in this story, the M4A4 Howl, was recently spotted in the inventory of B1T from NAVI. However, it is unlikely that any claims can be made against the current owners of skins – they certainly did not know that they were purchasing stolen items. Those who buy expensive items secondhand can be advised to check their history, for example, CSGO Float – if it shows that the item was on an account for a long time, which has now been deleted, and then changed its owner, perhaps you are seeing a skin that passed through the hands of scammers.
