Yet another friend's account falls prey to scammers
Three people on my friends list (so far) have fallen for that "vote for my friend's CS:GO team" scam. This is a conversation I've had multiple times, so I suspected this guy's account had been compromised from the very first message. The following is the message chain.
[23:39]
[SCAMMER]:
sup
[23:39]
Orion Invictus:
Hey.
[23:41]
[SCAMMER]:
Do me a small favour. Do u have 2 mins?
[23:41]
Orion Invictus:
I was about to head off, but sure.
[At this point, I opened up the account report screen and was just waiting for the "confirmation message" before filing the report.]
[23:45]
[SCAMMER]:
can u vote for my friends team please?
[This is when I reported him, before expressing my annoyance at the scammer.]
[23:45]
Orion Invictus:
Right, my friend's account was compromised. I'm reporting it.
Seriously, that's the third one so far. You people really need to stop annoying me.
This sucks because he's one of the few NMS players on my friends list, so thanks for that.
And yes, you people have actually tried to run this scam by me three separate times.
[23:47]
[SCAMMER]:
np
good luck
Anyway, this is just a venting thread to express my annoyance at these ######### stealing accounts.
Comments
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Never heard of this scam. How does it work? They send a link or something?
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Yes. The link is to a website that supposedly ranks CS:GO teams (by number of votes, because, as everyone knows, that's how things are decided in competitive scenes). It requires an account (or you can link it to your Steam account), and they use that to steal your login info.
3 -
Thanks for making me aware, although I never click links I don't trust anyway.
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Clicking on the link appears to be safe (though I have several add-ons to block stuff that might be malicious). The problem arises when you let it use your Steam account's information to "vote".
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Ouch, that sounds like quite the easy trap to fall into.
Do the scammers get past the Steam Mobile Authentication as well, though?
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I wouldn't know, my friends and I don't really talk about who has what security features.
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Yeah, same thing here. Thanks for the heads up nonetheless 👍
Much appreciated.
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If they do use the authenticator I really hope they check their system for malware. Might be new scamming methods that have been discovered since I used to attract scammers (TF2 item trading), but back then the only way they could really get around the authenticator was by using malware to get their hands on the victim's authenticator backup/reset codes from the logged-in Steam client/session on the victim's computer.
Either way that sucks big time, and I hope they can at least get their account back. Accounts can be recovered (even though any steam inventory trades that might have happened are final and will not be rolled back), https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2347-qdfn-4366 is a good place to start and I know someone that managed to recover their account after they got hijacked and sent me very similar scam messages as a result of a similar "operation" a few years back thanks to the steps in that article.
And I always appreciate any post, article, thread or whatever else that brings awareness to Steam scams. It might be easy to look back and just say "just don't click the links lol" but especially the "hijack account, target people on their friends list" exploits the trust that possibly long-time friends might have between eachother ☹️
1 -
I had this type of scammers once. He typed me about the same cs go sh1t. It was from a friend that I didn't communicate for a long time and it confused me for getting such a message like this from him. Googled it and found information about this scam move.
It happened 1 year ago.
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