To ensure that it is not blocked or deleted, they point to alleged Steam employees on Discord. Gift cards are required for verification. Attention: Don't pay anything , because the supposed Steam employees are also part of the fraud, warns our cooperation partner Watchlist Internet .
Do you have your own Steam and Discord account?
Then be careful of strangers who write to you to apologize and claim that they reported your Steam account. There is a sophisticated scam behind this that leads to loss of money!
How does the fraud work?
As a first step, you will receive a message from an unknown person on Discord that sounds, for example, like this:
“Hey User123, someone copied your profile and ripped me off. I didn't realize it was just a copy and have now reported your profile to Steam! I'm really sorry!"
All information in the message is fictitious. There is neither a copy of your own profile, nor was the other person ripped off or your own profile reported.
In order for you to react to the message, the criminal counterpart draws attention to the possible consequences of the message, but also presents the supposed solution to the problem in the next sentence:
“I'm really sorry for reporting your profile because if you get banned or blocked now, you will lose all your game progress and purchases on Steam and you really have an impressive profile.
There's definitely a lot of time and money involved! But you can get out of this if you contact the account XYZ_Admin123! He is a Steam admin here on Discord and can help you if you follow his steps.”
If you now contact the specified user XYZ_Admin123 to help you, you must know that you are writing to the same person, but who is now posing as a Steam employee on Discord:
“Hello User123. You contacted me because someone reported your profile. If you follow all of my verification steps, we can avoid the permanent ban on your profile.”
Now follows the step that shows what the criminals are actually after here, because apart from the fact that support on Steam and Discord is handled completely differently, Steam gift cards should be purchased and transmitted for verification:
“OK User123. So that we can check that you are really behind the profile, please buy a Steam voucher worth 100 euros here and send me the code. But don’t worry: when your profile is activated again, you will receive the money directly back into your account.”
If you send voucher codes here, you will lose your money because, apart from the fact that there is no problem with your profile, you are sending the codes directly to criminals who use the codes for themselves or resell them. However, the money or vouchers will never be charged back and you will therefore be stuck with the costs.
What can victims do?
Unfortunately, there is hardly any option for action with this scam.
As a rule, the money paid for the vouchers cannot be retrieved and the only option is to go to the police to file a report. In addition, the profiles from which you have been contacted on Discord should definitely report them in order to have them deleted.
Source: Watchlist Internet
Notes:
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