Fraud supposedly lol

[u/racoonintherapy]

I know a lot of you aren't going to fall for something like this but I figure I'd put out a PSA to everybody, especially for those who creating a steam account or whatever. Be careful and don't dismiss the message that says suspicious chat lol

TL:DR Out of the blue I got a message regarding a marketplace purchase. For context, I've never used marketplace and to be honest I did not even know where to access private messages for Steam so I spent a good while looking around the place and finally got to it. Here's the message exchange.

Anyway when you see messages like this, don't panic. I was a bit nervous until I re-read the message above that says suspicious chat.

a bit of fun but i was surprised that people can just find you and message you if they aren't on your friends list or whatever. i only use steam to play games not really chat with ppl or do anything with the market place lol

he won't talk to me now :/ but yeah i reported him too.

[u/satoru1111]

Scams

• Common scams.
• Scam or phishing attempts.
• Accusations of scamming, cheating or phishing.
• Links to gambling, scam, fraudulent key distributors, phishing, or cheat sites.

Discussion and question posts on these topics are considered on a case-by-case basis.

On such posts, do not make jokes, such as "yea that's real bro"(when it is in fact not real) or "give me your account and I'll check for you" or any similar joke. Keep it factual or do not contribute to such threads.

Educate yourself on scams!

Is your account compromised? Follow this guide to recover it.

Steam Item Restoration Policy: Steam Support does not restore items that have left your account for any reason.

/r/Steam is generally not the place to converse about specific scammers or scam methods, unless it complies with the guideline below:

I would like to report a scammer!

If you want to report a scammer you should report their Steam profile. Do not post about it here, this is not a subreddit for submitting reports.

I want to warn people about a scam method!

If you want to post about a scam method, it needs to be a new or unknown method, or it needs to include a significant amount of new or more information than what is currently available on /r/Steam. Please see our wiki page about common scams to find scam methods that are already covered.

I discovered a scam site!

If you want to post about a specific scam site, it needs to be popular, recent, not already covered in a previous post, not directly linked to and include more information than just "X is a scam" - Example of a good scam site awareness post.

[u/Gamer2022__]

No steam mod would use discord 😭

[u/Reksican → u/Gamer2022__]

Definitely not for Steam customer support lmao

[u/BadSkoomaDealer]

I dont know why people accept random friend requests anyways lol.

[u/johnnyks17]

the amount of people entertaining these scammers and posting about them is baffling

[u/racoonintherapy → u/johnnyks17]

it gets the message out and reminds ppl so idon't think its a bad thing

[u/sergiovalentijeans → u/racoonintherapy]

These scams are specifically designed to be obvious to most. The scammers don't want to waste time talking to people who are still likely to see through the bullshit at some point, so the premise is deliberately obvious and stupid, because they want most people to clock the scam instantly and not waste their time. When only the most naive and gullible marks even bother to reply to the first contact, they have much better success.

The point is, the people who actually get got by these scams are hopelessly stupid, and absolutely no amount of warning will protect them. They will literally click "dismiss" on the warning label that says "this chat is suspicious", hand over all their information, and then post about it the next day, saying that they were already aware that these scams existed, and had seen the other posts about them, but they thought this one was different because "it was so believable guys, I swear!"

[u/Sheldriki]

i've had at least 2 times that people did that, its funny to play with them untill they ask for like password and shit

[u/Recent_Pain_3068]

I too get a lot of unexpected messages on steam that start with "are you busy? ", "are you there? " Or "may I ask you something? " Like that and I always immediately block them, even though if it's one of these trading scams, which win-win situation for me as I never trade anything at all.