I don’t usually start pit threads, but I’m slightly annoyed and venting. Last weekend (by which I mean the weekend of the first), I get an e-mail from Steam. I’ve got the computer verification enabled, so before Steam is accessed from another location, I get an e-mail saying, “We see you’re trying to access Steam from this IP. Is this you and should we allow it?”, and I got such an e-mail, letting me know that somebody was trying to access my steam account from somewhere in Inner Mongolia. “That’s odd”, I said to myself, “I don’t THINK I’ve been in Inner Mongolia recently.”
So, as suggested, I changed my password and hit the button to suspend access to my account. Then I wrote up a support ticket, reporting the incident and seeing what I should do to make sure whoever it can’t get access and get my account unsuspended.
This was August 31th. It’s now September 8th. My account is still locked, the ticket still open and unresponded to. I understand they’re busy, but I’d like at least some sort of acknowledgement.
I’m kinda confused, why would you suspend your account? Shouldn’t the password change prevent anyone who previously gained access from getting in again? And in any case, it doesn’t sound like they actually gained access.
But in anycase, yea, Steam should stay on top of their open support tickets, especially in cases where someone is locked out of their account.
Well, I suspended my account because the e-mail told me to. Specifically, it said:
"If you did not attempt this action, please change your password immediately or follow this link to the Steam Support site to lock your account and submit a request for assistance: "
Of course they should have unsuspended your account by now. But they might think that the person who changed the password and the person who suspended the account are two different people.
No, I went to the Steam customer service site and filled out a ticket. I didn’t click on any links in the email itself. So I don’t think I’m a phishing victim… just somebody who panicked, read “or” as “and”, overreacted, and now want Valve to respond to me.
I have not been wildly impressed with Steam overall, perhaps colored by my early experience with them in which, after purchasing three separate titles, I had to contact the support desk and open a problem ticket with them before they would grant me permission to install the software I had just bought.
If you haven’t already (or recently (like, the last couple days)), poke them with a stick and see if that helps.
It did get resolved after I updated the ticket. They had me run a virus scan and changed my passwords, warned ne that if my account got hacked again, they would cancel it, and deactivated it.
So, nothing happened, you did nothing wrong, you did exactly what they said you should do, and they said if this happens again, they’re cancelling your account.
I will point out that while it says that my account was “repeatedly hijacked”, to the best of my knowledge, this was the only time it happened (and, like I had pointed out, it wasn’t actually hijacked. Somebody had requested a password change from a foreign computer and it triggered steamguard.)
I’m not entirely sure what GAF is, so I don’t know…I mean, I don’t want to piss off Steam to the extent that they actually do cancel my account.
If the account is hijacked, he loses access to his paid content regardless of what Valve’s support team does. Closing the account just discourages the re-sale and theft of further accounts.
His paid content is not a commodity that can be stolen (and become unavailable), unless Steam artificially deems it so. They’re the ones who throw the shutoff… uh, valve, on accessing it. I sense that they’re trying to limit “thefts” that are actually attempts by users to share or sell their own content, but it’s a pretty shitty way to treat their customers who truly are victims of fraud or hacking.
