Steam Account Alert

1

If I go to any page on steampowered.com, there is a button at the top called “Account Alert”. When I go to my profile page Steam Community :: mark_wr Covenant it includes the sentence “Your profile is being forced private due to an active Community Ban on your account.” When I click “Account Alert”, I see:

Account Alert for mark_wr - Nov 16, 2022
This account has been locked for posting or upvoting suspicious content on Steam
When content on Steam is classified as suspicious, an account that posted or upvoted the content is locked so that the account owner can secure their account, email, and computer.
Suspicious content includes links, messages and other types of content that are used for account theft, scamming, phishing, and other malicious or illegal activities.
The account will have restricted functionality until you’ve contacted Steam Support. Interacting in the Community, trading, using the market, making changes to the account, and playing on VAC-secured servers will all be unavailable in the meantime.
Contact Steam Support

I then checked my emails, and have 2 emails (one at 6:49am and one at 6:54am), both saying:

Hello mark_wr
Your account has recently upvoted a user review that was banned for attempting to scam users or other violations of Steam’s Rules & Guidelines.
If you didn’t vote on the item(s) below, you need to change your Steam password now. It’s possible that your email address and/or computer are compromised as well.
Please carefully review our Account Security Recommendations for additional information.
The Banned Review: Dangerous Waters
Your account will be unable to vote on user reviews on Steam until Dec 16 @ 3:49am (the other email says Dec 16 @ 3:54am)
If you have further questions about this, please contact Steam Support.
Cheers,
The Steam Team

I am 99% sure I did not even visit the store page for “Dangerous Waters” in the last month, let alone upvote any reviews for it.

I looked at changing my password, but that may take some effort due to the current security restrictions that ask for a lot of my information, at which point I am hesitant to supply that information in case this whole thing is a scam to get that information. I will next click the “Contact Steam Support” link in that first message and see if that seems to be legit, and if so ask for advice there.

Have any of you had this experience before? If so, what steps did you take, and how did it go? :eyes: Thanks.

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I personally have not had experience with or even heard of someone having their account locked for up voting something. Seems strange, but it also makes sense. Scammers have multiple accounts and likely up vote their own posts across the accounts in order for more people to see it.

I would definitely change your password. That’s just a good first step in securing your account whether it has been compromised or not. If you believe something to be suspicious like a link, never click it. It doesn’t matter if the email says it’s from “Valve” or not. The email sender can be spoofed and made to look like it came from the official steam support.

Instead, manually navigate to the support page on the steam website and contact them to see what’s going on. Also see if they would be able to send you a password reset link to your email.

One tip for determining if a link is good or bad, is to hover over it and see what the description says. In browsers, this description will show up at the bottom left. If the link doesn’t have a preview, you can right click and copy the link. Then paste it into something like notepad to see where it actually goes. If it seems odd or has a huge string of letters and numbers after it (tracking cookie), I would go to a website like https://wheregoes.com and paste the link there to see where it actually lands. If it lands where you expect, then it’s likely safe. Many email links will have some sort of tracking cookie or redirect to allow marketing to track effectiveness of email campaigns.

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I did manually type in the address steampowered.com in my browser, so I did not use any link supplied to me by email or any other source.

When I clicked “Contact Steam Support” there, it definitely looks legit.

I followed their instructions, and told them:

I ran Malwarebytes full security scan. It found no problems.

I changed my email password to a new 30 character password with upper/lower/numbers/special-characters. That email also has 2FA, so it is very secure.

I also use the Steam Guard 2FA app, so my Steam activities should also be quite secure.

If you need more info, let me know. Otherwise, please recover my account. Thank you.

ps - I am also willing to change my Steam password, but please tell me the easiest steps to do so.

======

I’ll wait for their reply.

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If only more people did this and used a password manager like LastPass or Bitwarden.

Hopefully it works out for you! :crossed_fingers:

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Hey Mark

the ban is definitely real:

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it could be that you simply upvoted something on the activity feed that then later got flagged. Reviews from friends also appear on the activity page so you don’t have to go to the store page of said game to do that. Perhaps it could also be that you upvoted something that then later got edited with the questionable content. I don’t know if that’s possible and how Steam would handle such an occurrence.

I hope they sort this out for u asap

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I have not opened my activity page for months, so that’s not it.

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8

that’s very strange, so it seems either something physically happened on your hardware which you’re unaware of, which seems very unlikely, or your account got compromised in some way, but that also kind of seems unlikely because you obviously still have access to it so it’s not like someone stole it from you, or it must be some type of bug or false positive, which would also be quite unusual, I’d think

in any case, let’s hope they sort this out for you quickly

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The only thing I can think of that makes any sense, is that sometime in the past (likely at least months ago), I must have up-voted a review (and do not now remember doing it), and Steam only recently flagged that review as suspicious.

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10

If they’re just using the account in order to upvote and give legitimacy to their scams they wouldn’t need to fully steal the account and risk the user fighting back to reclaim it, they’d be better served to keep it low key and just use the account from time to time.

I suppose it is possible that another user had their account compromised and their already highly visible reviews altered to promote scams, which you had previously upvoted.

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11

Honestly, this sounds like what it could have been. I know when my friends got hacked, their profiles changed. If the hackers intent was to advertise something, they’d target reviews, community guides etc etc.

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I think this was the case. I don’t think steam has a time limit for flagging reviews so it could have been even longer ago.

Though I think that steam overreacted. One upvote caused it? Nobody would want to upvote anymore.

I hope you get it resolved because you did nothing wrong.

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On the other hand IF your account was actually compromised but the only thing the intruder does is upvote scam reviews you probably wouldn’t really notice, so in such an event for steam to let the sound of the alarm echo down to those upvoting the review might be a really good thing. I’d certainly appreciate a notification if there was even a suspicion that my account was being meddled with, better safe and change the password now than having to go through the effort of account reclamation later.

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The one thing I wonder about, is what did the review even say. I can’t read it now because it’s been taken down. I’m curious how it was worded, because if I had actually up-voted it, it likely would have been because they mentioned something about the game that would help me decide if I would like the game.

Anyway, in the future I may be a little hesitant to up-vote a review (unless it is made by one of my Steam friends. So, yeah, you’re right, this policy could diminish up-votes in the long run.

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Woohoo, this morning I see that my Steam account is back to normal (except that review posting and voting privileges are still suspended for the 30 days). :nerd_face:

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Glad that your restriction will soon be over :slight_smile: Except better ranking what else they get ?

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Congrats! I’m glad things worked out. Just don’t do anything suspicious for a while and you’re set.

@Allex

thunder

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Heh, the only thing suspicious that I did this time was to up-vote a review (that is, if I’m the one who did it, still not sure), and right now up-voting is blocked to me for the next 30 days, so I can’t “accidentally” make that mistake again for a while, lol.

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19

Oh Dear Lord, I come back to find that @markwr is a Steam Criminal. Oh the horrors! Should we all get together and send a care package or you out of the woods yet?

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Yeah, I never knew I was such a bad boy rebel. Thank you Steam for bringing that to my attention. :shushing_face:

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21

It is like you were in a market… paid all …but even with that store security system checkpoint door activated :scream_cat:

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