A story of trolling: How Russians destroyed my steam acct.

Hi there.

I just figured I'd let someone know about how Russians can completely fuck your steam account due to the unique way they operate in that region. But first, foreshadowing!

I was playing ARMA2 wasteland on a Russian server having a generally good time. Throughout the whole match they were talking on the global channel just spamming the absolute hell out of it. In every other server talking even for an instant will get you chastised by about 50 people telling you to shut up instantly but not on this server. But back to the matter at hand. As people are usually wont to do I decided to lightly mess with them.

Every time they tried to talk on global I'd respond by just going "shhhhhhh quiet time" over global. That's it. Shushing. Incredibly lame considering what people say on the internet 99% of the time in such situations. The next day I was just idling in games for cards and noticed 20p had randomly gone into my account out of nowhere. I was incredibly puzzled by this so clicked on market transactions and found this:

"27 Jun 2013 Wallet 10pyб. Credit"

What the fuck? How did 10 rubles get added to my account? I instantly panicked that someone had hacked my account and added 10 rubles to it. I fired off an email to steam support about the transaction and set about to scanning my PC for viruse and changing my passwords. 4 days later steam finally gets back to me with this message:

"Hello Andrew, Thank you for contacting Steam Support. We apologize for the delay. There is a payment method in Russia that allows users to input cash into a kiosk and send the funds to their Steam account. It appears as though a Russian customer has entered the wrong Steam account name, yours, by mistake. Your account was not compromised, they have just sent funds to your account accidentally."

Oh. So someone "accidentally" added 10 rubles into my account. Well that's sort of understandable except for a few things.

-It happened a day after I annoyed some Russians online

-It was in rubles, and an incredibly small denomination

Nobody "accidentally" puts to 10rubles into someone's account. In the 9+ years I've had my account this has never happened once. The icing on the cake? I'm reading the support website and then this pops up in steam:

"#checkout_payment_method_kiosk has charged back a recent Steam Store transaction.

27 Jun 2013

10 pуб.

Wallet funds

Content purchased with these wallet funds has been removed from your account.

This account will have restricted functionality for 9 weeks.

This account will be restricted for 9 weeks (until 31 Aug). Purchasing, gifting, trading, cd-key activation, and Steam Community access have been disabled. If the chargeback is removed, this restriction will be lifted and the content will be returned to your account."

What. The. Fuck. Either the perpetrators or Steam charged back the 10 rubles which in turn caused my account to be transaction banned for 9 weeks on the cusp of the steam sales. I'm going to have to wait another 4 days for steam support to get back to me about this whole ordeal. It's probably just valves system fucking itself up. After everything that's happened I hope it's just that.

The moral of the story is don't annoy Russians on the internet. They will fuck you in ways you never even thought possible. But here I am, totally fucked! I just don't want to let this happen to anyone else.

If this is really what happens then I can only say: Wow. *slowclap*

This is some high level trolling right there.

@monkfishesq: I feel like the real problem here is that Steam support is A) glacially slow, and must be horribly understaffed, and B) seem oblivious to all of the ways that unscrupulous characters *cough*Russians*cough* scam their system, such as the 2012 Christmas Sale when the present/coal system was so easily scammable.

Thats both incredibly clever and also horrifying that someone could compromise your account so easily with little to no effort on their part.

This!

Don't play with Russians = problem solved. Xenophobia wins every time.

I should clarify that this statement above was sarcastic.

That's pretty damn crazy. I'm sorry dude.

That would indeed be a dick move to fake the Valve servers into disabling your account just before the summer sales.

Every time they tried to talk on global I'd respond by just going "shhhhhhh quiet time" over global.

Don't be a dick on the internet, problem solved.

In Soviet Russia, Internet fucks you....over

Really though, that sucks. Sorry duder. The lesson is of course to never mess with random people on the Internet.

Well, that sucks. In the eventuality that your ban doesn't get lifted before the Sumer sales kick off could try creating a new account, buying all Summer sale games you want as gifts, then gifting them to your account when your ban is lifted. Maybe you had arrived at that solution yourself though.

Keep us posted duder!

Yes, an appropriate response to someone being mildly annoying is to get their steam account banned for 9 weeks on purpose.

Ridiculous. I knew someone would try and shift the blame. Gross.

I think this really speaks more to how crappy Steam support is. Their insistence on not being able to appeal any decisions or really interact with them leads to awful situations like this. I hope you can get this overturned.

As much as I appreciate Steam as a platform, their support remains one of my least favorite and most disappointing parts of the service.

Regarding B, I don't think they care at all as long as they get / keep Steam users. Those numbers are what keeps them alive (by attracting more content) after all. Also the great gift pile was not a big risk for them, since the contents of a present were controlled by them they could easily limit how much they were giving away (they had a certain number of 3rd party items and once those ran out all you got was Valve games / coupons).

This seems pretty similar to some eBay troll tactics that I've seen, abusing standard transaction protection systems for fun and profit.

I think that's awesome. That's such a great move.

So... did you buy something with that 10 rubles?

Nope. I let it sit there and didn't buy/sell/trade anything. I was idling for cards at the time it got put into my account and was looking forward to selling them before the steam sales.

The cold war begins...

So can this only happen if they know your account name? If so, just another reason to not have your community/IGN as your account name, assuming that's how they found it out.

Nope. My steam account name is separate from any of my IGN's.

I'm still confused. How could they add funds to your account in the first place without having a password?

No. What he was doing was an incredibly tame version of what anyone will do on the vast majority of Arma servers. You just don't talk in global. Keep it in group/direct/vehicle/ maaaybe side but most likely not. If you think that is being a dick, you must be new to the internet.

I think they can get it from the Arma 2 server. At least the steam id.

Apparently, there are Russian locations where they will send money directly to a Steam account. So, while they can't spend the money from your account without a password, they can freely add money to your account and then get this to happen.

Ban all Russians from the internet for ever. It's the only way to be sure.

Ah, well how the hell does that get him banned then though?

Either they charged back the transaction or it's a fuck up with steams system. When they removed the funds the charge back system restricted my account automatically.

One of those has to be the reason vov

He gets banned from transactions due to the person then pulling the amount, as though the money had been stolen rather than given to him. It's basically framing a random user to look as though they're some kind of scammer.

damn its true

Oh wow. Thats crazy. And almost sort of respectable at their resourcefulness even though its really scummy at the same time.

Man, Russians are assholes.

Tell Steam about your situation and I'd bet you're back to normal in no time.

That's really messed up, but also brilliant. Those crazy Russians. DAMN YOU GAMEBOMB!

Also, it seems like you're taking it all in stride which is good. Hopefully Steam support will remove the ban, i'm sure this happens pretty often.

@demoskinos said:

In the eyes of Steam, it probably looks like the equivalent of him writing a bad check that bounced.

Thats pretty elaborate for getting someone banned from steam for 9 weeks.

God damn Russians... Screwing things over for people in Dota and in ARMA and copying GB.

@dudeglove: I'm sorry you live in Russia :(

Did you learn nothing?

I learned lots of things! If he'd have grown up in any other country he would have probably not turned out a piece of shit!

I think I dreamed of The Winter Soldier last night.

Is this viral marketing for the new Company of Heroes game?

I love this, so much. I'm sorry.

@monkfishesq: have you talked to steam support about the 9 week ban?

i mean, they clearly said themselves, someone ELSE "accidental" put shit in your account, they should be able to lift that 9 week ban for you.

If someone did that to me, i'd hire mr 47 asap.

Yeah I instantly replied to the support ticket when I saw the charge back. It happened right after I got the reply. It takes them a fucking eon to answer any support tickets. It's a joke.

Don't disclose your Steam account name.

Never underestimate the lengths people will go to fuck with people on the internet.

@forcen:

It's like people don't read at all! I didn't.

Yeah. I can't recall a single good thing ever being said about Steam's support. Everything I see/hear about it is anywhere from shitty to completely abysmal, I pray Valve plans to restructure it's support system or something because it makes an otherwise great service a potential nightmare when something goes wrong.

At least it's not as bad as K2/Gamersfirst/Reloaded Productions though. Fuck everything about that shitty company.

It was worth every ruble.