A certain user with the nickname Steam Help has been known in the player community for some time. He was said to be connected to someone in support Steam and because of that he can get any account data. In a series of videos dedicated to this case, youtuber Mzkshow mentions that some players asked Steam Help for help in restoring their game profile, and he sent them account information that could not be obtained in any other way as proof of his abilities.
However, new information has recently emerged about the activities of this man, whose real name remains unknown. Turns out that Steam Help was not a middleman, but a support staff member himself. He colluded with another person who appears in the video Mzkshow as Alexander, and they used the existing account recovery mechanism for their own purposes.
How did the fraudulent scheme work?
By contacting the support service Steam, the user can regain access to his profile, even if he lost access to the mail to which it was tied. To do this, you need to confirm your identity and provide as much detail as possible, such as the first key that was activated on the account. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where two people are trying to access an account – a scammer and the legitimate owner. Each of them tries to prove that the account belongs to them by providing some sort of information. Most likely, support will give priority to the one who provides more information.
This is exactly the mechanism used by Steam Help and Alexander. The scammers chose accounts that had expensive items in their inventory. In doing so, they chose profiles that had been inactive for many days or had once changed ownership. Using Steam Help access to account data, they went through the process of regaining access, then sold the items and deleted the account. The amount they managed to withdraw in this way over the course of a year was over 320 thousand dollars.
The illustration below – is an example of how a window with user information might look like in the interface of a support employee.
In addition, it turned out that these two – scammers were not the only ones who used a similar mechanism. Mzkshow notes that at one point Alexander and Steam Help encountered «competitors» - someone had time to withdraw items from the accounts they had targeted before they would do so themselves.
What Valve?
This scheme was possible because of the way Steam support is structured. Due to the large number of players in different time zones, Valve outsources all typical issues, while the second level of support ( Valve directly) handles only atypical and complex situations. It was one such outsourcing company that Steam Help worked for. This can be indirectly confirmed by the fact that, according to Mzkshow, Valve recently severed its relationship with one of its outsourcers and a number of employees were laid off from there. The blogger suggests that it could have been 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, as the information that the fraudsters could provide to support them was always more complete. This was the case until they tried to steal access from a user who himself had some ties to Valve. As a result, he managed to get his account back, and the outsourcing company was audited.
Most of the skins that the scammers managed to obtain ended up with collectors, including, for example, Anomaly. And one of the items featured in this story, an M4A4 Howl, was recently spotted in the B1T inventory from NAVI. However, it is unlikely that any claims can be made against the current owners of the skins – they were certainly unaware that they were purchasing stolen items. Those who buy expensive items from hand, you can advise to check their history, for example, CSGO Float – if it shows that the item was on the account for a long time, which is now deleted, and then changed the owner, perhaps you see a skin that has passed through the hands of fraudsters.
