A fucking Steam/Paypal horror story
By NoDeath 26 Comments
This morning I received an email from Steam support. An email I've been waiting for days for with baited breath. An email that finally, put an end to this god damn shit storm.
But clearly I'm getting ahead of myself.
Lets rewind to shortly before Christmas last year. For various reasons, I came into possession of a Razor Callahan endorsed FIVE GRAND! (note: not actually endorsed by Razor Callahan). Now, being a semi-responsible human being, the first thing I spent the money on was a bunch of crap I needed for college, which I'm starting this year. Now, only being a semi-responsible human being, instead of spending the rest on a car or something that would be otherwise useful, I decided to spend it on SWEET, SWEET VIDEO GAMES. More specifically I put a large chunk aside to build a really good gaming rig. Determined not to simply squander the money I spent a huge amount of time researching what parts to get, where to get them and how to put the thing together myself. Because of this, I finished the build just a few days before the end of December. Which, coincidentally was when I was scheduled to take a two week trip to visit my dad in Dubai. A yearly ritual in which he spends as much money as he can on me in the hopes that I forget the fact he normally has nothing to do with me.
Now I had a bad-ass new PC, but no games that could harness its power. So of course I turned to Steam. Just before I left, I transferred a bunch of money from my bank account to my Paypal account, which is how I have to buy stuff online as I don't have a credit card, then off I went. It takes about a week for funds to transfer into Paypal using this method so it was about a week into the trip that, upon checking my emails on my dads laptop, I saw that the money was in. Barely able to contain my excitement I decided to purchase everything I wanted from the steam store then and there so that I could download and start playing the games the second I got back home.
I bought about $300 worth of games that day. Here's a quick run down:
- Modern Warfare 2
- Borderlands
- Dragon Age: Origins
- Crysis
- Torchlight
- Left 4 Dead 2
- Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl
Now I know what your thinking.
Where's the 'horror' part of the story? Five grand? A new PC? A two week all expense paid trip to one of the worlds biggest tourist destinations? Are you sure you're not just some spoilt kid turning to the internet for yet another small glob of attention?
Well I'm glad you asked dear reader, for this is where, as they say, the shit hit the fan.
What follows is a small but deadly chain of events. Paypal noticed I was spending money from Dubai instead of Australia, my normal place of residence. This raised a red flag at paypal so they cut access to my account pending an investigation, contacted the seller, in this case Steam and withheld the funds from being transferred. Seeing as the funds didn't get through to Steam, this counted as payment fraud under the Steam subscriber agreement so they disabled my account. Shut it down. Killed it. In the span of a few hours I had lost access to both my Paypal and Steam accounts and almost $1000 dollars worth of games, $300 of which I hadn't had a chance to start downloading, much less install and play. I spent a good 3 hours sitting in front of that laptop trying to figure all this out. Needless to say, many an expletive was uttered.
At this point I was just realising exactly how deep in shit I really was. Obviously my first thought was 'How the fuck do I fix this'. Actually I should say first rational thought. My first thought was something along the lines of 'AAAAAAAAH! I'M SO FUCKING SCREWED! AHHHHHH!!!111!'. Looking to Paypal first I discovered that in order to regain access to my account I had to prove I was me. How do I do this? Well they charge two small cent fees to my credit card, then I relay back to them what two amounts they charged. Easy enough, right? The astute reader will remember as I mentioned earlier I don't have a credit card. But wait! They have alternative methods! Firstly, they could use the charging method except with my bank account. That sounded fine to me but no matter how many times I tried it, the damn thing simply wouldn't let me past the screen where I chose which bank account I wanted charged. Eventually I gave up and sent them a scan of my drivers license. The next day I checked and after having to change my password and security questions my account was unlocked.
Fantastic! I thought, things are going swimmingly! Now I could only hope that the disabled steam account wasn't permanent. I contacted steam support with an email that in all honesty was far snarkier than it should have been. In my defence I was tired and now that the shock had worn off, just plain angry at the whole situation. Well I got my dues in an equally snarky response telling me I needed to fix the Paypal issue first and kindly reminded me that the games on the account couldn't be transferred to another and that I couldn't get a refund on the games I'd just bought. Gee, thanks. Back to the problem at hand. I'd already fixed the Paypal issue. Hadn't I? It turns out that while yes I had regained access to my account, the payment itself was still under investigation.
So back I went. Looking at the Paypal resolution centre, the payment stated that it required action from me before it could be fixed but try as I might I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was I needed to do. Eventually I gave up and just sent them an email. Being polite this time I explained the situation and awaited a reply. And waited. And waited a little more. Almost a full week after I'd sent the email, I got a very apologetic reply telling me it had all been fixed. The payment had been sent. Back in Australia at this point, I literally spent a few minutes dancing around my room in joy before sending one final email to Steam. The response to which I was referring to at the beginning of this behemoth of a post.
So in the end all was well. I've always been a huge supporter of steam and it saddens me to say this ordeal has seriously affected my view of the service as there where a few points where I genuinely thought I wasn't going to get my account back. I'm not really sure what I should take from this. I know the security measures are there for a reason and I'm pretty sure my situation is in the minority.
PS: Thank you very much if you actually bothered to read all this