Hey guys, little help. My son got taken advantage of and I'm seeing if y'all have ideas.

From what I can tell he was trying to add a friend and somehow got talked into disabling his mobile authenticator. At that point they took over his account, changed the email associated with the account, etc.

Looks like they created a new account with his email so now every time we try to reset password it tries to reset the new account.

I'm thinking he is screwed because they have already changed all the authenticators, but I thought I'd ask y'all.

Saw this...looks like if you jump through enough hoops you will get to real support that can help.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1126288560

Ok that looks very helpful. Will try it!


A bit more info... Looks like he was on Discord looking to add friends to play Rust. One guy had him click a link to add him. It sent him to what he thought was a steam log in, but that's how they got his account info. After that they were able to have steam text him a code to disable mobile authenticator... But they told him it was a friend code and my son didn't read the text. Bam... They got him. Really sucks

OK got it submitted to support. Thank you so much for the link with instructions. I'm optimistic we'll get it back because we had all the original info to provide them.

The new login was overseas as well. Should be easy for them to see that the account was obviously stolen .

Yikes. Hope it all gets resolved.

Yeah I need to have a sit down with my two boys (age 12 and 14) on phishing soon. They're on Roblox and other games with chat. I've blocked their access to Discord and cel phones but that wall probably crumbles within the next year. I'll probably just keep all the MFA on my phone, as annoying as that can be.

Yeah, he was able to show me the Discord page with the link. It linked to a page that looked exactly like a steam profile page. But if you looked at the URL it was "seam.com".

If you clicked any of the store links etc it would go to the actual steam page so it all seemed legit... So as soon as he tried to add that friend and it prompted him to sign in it was over.

The only thing he could have avoided was reading the text from steam that it was NOT a friend code but instead a code to disable mobile authentication.

But I think we can get it back, just sucks. Plus I had to cancel my credit card before they started buying stuff... So now I'll have to change all my auto pay accounts.

And yes, my son is 14 also and he's pretty clever. He was pretty upset that he fell for it. But a good lesson to learn now.

Awesome, glad to hear it! Hopefully they didn't do too much damage while they were in there.

Definitely a hard lesson to learn. You might also check that that email/password combo isn't used for any other logins.

Do they teach this stuff in school yet? You would think with the prevalence of it, some mandatory computer class would have a yearly section on it.

Glad this worked out OK. People scamming kids...what is the world coming to?

they should make kids play Diablo 2 or Runescape. I think those two games prepared me to recognize a scam more than anything else i have done.

Getting scammed in Diablo 2 was definitely a rite of passage.

That's a great incident to have with no real impact. Better than a bank account when he's 30.