Account compromised with steam. Anything I can do to move this process along?
As the title states, my account was hijacked 2 days ago, all my high value counterstrike items immediately disappeared, which came as no surprise to me, but whomever took my account somehow changed the recovery email, because it's an email i've never seen before. I've been trying every way I can think of to get my account back, but I really don't want to wait 3+ months just to have steam support say "Oh, i'm sorry we need more information", to then wait 3 more months to probably hear the same thing. I'm just wondering if anybody in the masterrace has experience in this field. This is my compromised profile, I'm not really certain in how this sub could help, but honestly i'm just desperately grasping at straws here. I now see the advantage of hard copies :'(
Posted Sep 27, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC
Do you know who hijacked it and has your items? I know my brothers account was hacked awhile back, he knew the account that took it and saw his items in the persons inventory, and he didnt have access to his account for awhile and his account was then used to try and phish others ( he made a second account while his main one was down to tell others not to click his links ) after contacting steam, he got his account back, i think his ban status was removed from the phishing attempts, he got his items back, and the other guy got banned
Well, I have the account of the guy who baited me into downloading the .exe that hijacked my account, but I didnt take any pictures as evidence before they took over my account, I don't think steam would keep around any records of peoples chats, so I don't really have any damning proof :\
Does your items appear in the hijackers inventory? My brother might be able to help you in some steps to getting your stuff back and your account, since this basically happened to him..
EDIT: u/man-ga , may you be able to tell tale of your story?
I did get hijacked though that was for TF2 and was a while back before steam made some changes to security, thought what I did may still help:
Item History
To give more credibility to your story, I'd suggest finding 3rd party websites that give a history of your inventory both before and after the hijack. My items were TF2 so I used backpack.tf to get a screenshot of both before and after. I'm not sure what you'd use for counterstrike, though I think backpack.tf now has a section for cs. Also take inventory of what's been taken (especially unique items that would be key indicators) so that you can identify the hijacker's profile easier.
Tracking
The account that hijacked you most likely wasn't the benefactor of the hijacking. It's most likely a secondary profile set up to send out phishing links, or another poor sap's profile that was taken over and then put to work sending out phishing links to friends and adding new ones to do the same while passing items to the account that created it. Get a temporary steam account, find your profile, go to the phisher's profile, check their friends list and see if one of their "friends" seem to have items very similar to yours. He will most likely be the hijacker. Take screenshots of both the secondary and primary hijacker's accounts, take a screenshot of their inventory. Send all of it to steam support.
What To Expect
If I can remember I was without my account for a month and thus had to play on a temporary account. I got my account back but not my items, those came about a week later. At this point you'll also now have your trade history so you can now see for sure where your items went to. Also when you get it back you'll most likely have a few bans on your account due to the hijack. Do mention the bans in subsequent responses to steam support and they'll be able to remove them.
Be Polite
If you can, tell friends about your hijacking so that they don't fall victim as well, even if they don't have anything of value in their inventories themselves. After getting your account back, send out a copy-pasted message to everyone on your friends list (which is most likely allot bigger now) saying what happened on your account, that you now have your account back, that you're sorry for any trouble it caused them, and do give them the option to remove you from their friends list.
I'll try to see if I can remember anymore, but you need to act swiftly before the creep does anything with them that would make the retrieval process all the harder.
Thank you for the clean, comprehensive list, i'm finding it useful, although sadly not too fruitful. I checked backpack.tf for my csgo item history and it doesnt look as if I've ever used it before, as such there's no logs of my inventory prior to the attack. Additionally I used the website to peruse the phishers friendslist and only 1 item I owned showed up in any of the high value inventory's. Fortunately it seems to be all they wanted from my account was the items, as they've yet to log back in to the account since they took my stuff. I want to reiterate that I really appreciate you compiling this information here for me, it's just unfortunate that I was so sloppy in keeping records of my account and it's coming back to bite me.
Nope, unfortunately it looks like it may not even be his main account, only a few games/items on it :\
try following my brothers list above, that may be able to help you. god speed