Friendly reminder to everyone that there is a surge of malicious actors attempting to hijack Steam accounts through the method used below. Recently, I received a few reports of accounts belonging fellow TAW members having been hijacked. They have been notified appropriately. 

If you experience this type of engagement, the attacker will have compromised your friend's account and is reaching out to everyone on their friends list in the same way. The attacker gains access to your account by claiming they're a "Steam Admin" and tricking you into providing your password and Steamguard code, if enabled. 

A Steam/Valve administrator/employee/moderator will never add you as a friend to talk about any of the following things. If Valve needs to talk to you about something they will contact you through an account alert. 

A Valve employee will always have a Valve Employee Steam profile badge and a Steam moderator will always have a Steam Community Moderator Steam profile badge.

• There's no such thing as appealing a pending or false report or ban.
• There's no such thing as a pending ban.
• There's no such thing as a pending report.
• There's no such thing as a false report.
• There's no such thing as item verification or item scanning.
• There's no such thing as a Certificate of Eligibility.
• There's no such thing as an accidental report, and if someone truly did accidentally report you, Valve will see that the report is not valid and nothing will happen.

Someone representing Valve or Steam will never ask you for your items or account credentials, this includes your log-in name and authenticator codes. Do not share them with anyone.

What to do if your or your friend's account has been hijacked: 

• If you see this message being sent from one of your friend's account, try and get hold of them through a different channel, i.e. the TAW message centre for any fellow TAW members Let them know that their account has been compromised and share the steps below
• Run a full antivirus scan on your machine. We recommend Avast Free 2020 for those that don't have any antivirus installed. 
• Wait for the the AV scan to finish and confirm that no threats have been found or all threats have been removed. 
• Recover your Steam account, Change your Steam password immediately and set up Steam Guard
• Deauthorize all other computers through Steam Guard
• We also highly recommend for you to change your email password, along with any other accounts that share the same credentials (username and password) and those you used with steam when your account got hacked. 
• Verify that your account & profile settings and info are still the same as before; if not, change this back
• Check your Steam Inventory for any missing items
• Check if any of your friends have been blocked/removed, if this is the case you can now add them back again
• Be aware that your friends may ask you about this if they have received the phishing message, tell them that 

How to keep your Steam account (and any other account) safe:

• Verify your contact email address with Steam
• Enable Steam Guard (either email or mobile) | Steam Guard Knowledge Base
• Do not share your password or authentication code with anyone 
• If you believe your password may have been stolen, change it ASAP
• Never add people you don't recognise/trust
• Never click unknown links from untrusted sources on your friends list.
• Valve employees will never contact you through chat for official business, if anyone claims to be an "admin", report that profile
• Be vigilant for any further scam attempts, some common examples can be found in this Reddit post

PS: A "Middleman" isn't a real thing either, if anyone suggests one for trade, you're most likely about to be scammed. Once you've traded away your items, they're gone. 

Stay safe out there! 

MGN. Arianni

Digital Security Division Commander