For those that are no in the know – Steam is the company that runs the servers and account details of games such as Half Life 2 and such – the FULL game list I have linked. When you buy a game that is Steam enabled, when you go to install you need a steam account and that game (plus serial) is now linked to that account. If anything happens to this account – the game on the shelf is of no use, you cannot play without that account or re-register another account and install. This works most of the time but what happens when it all goes wrong? Read on for my complete story so far..

In the beginning

I bought the Orange pack in a local store, it asked me to create a Steam account, which I did and we were soon on the way to playing games such as Halflife2, HL2DM and so on. I had set it up so that it auto logged on when you started the computer / steam and all was well.

How steam works

If you want to change anything on steam, this includes passwords or email – you have to confirm this via email – so in theory nobody should be able to change your account without your permission. I am always on top of making sure I do not have key loggers installed and my passwords are all different across all services and they are a mixture of Captials, lowercase and numbers.

Failed to log in

I got gifted a game and it was only then I started the client and noticed it was not logging in. I tried the various passwords I knew it could be but none worked. I then proceeded to try and reset the password but the emails that are supposed to arrive never did.

Logging a call

I created a support account and logged a ticket and waited FIVE working days to get a reply, they reset the password and the account email and once again I had full control over this account. I was worried though that the person who had hacked my account could just go back in at a later date and do the same again, so I created another ticket.

The mystery person

I noticed the person had changed my picture (some dark skinned person)and had added a load of his friends plus added me to various groups. I had no account of all my friends I used to have listed. I should have taken some screen shots but I forgot and changed all the details to mine, removed all the friends and groups.  I then got flooded with requests of forgotten password – it was obvious that this person was trying to log into my account and get the password reset but this time they were failing. I noticed his IP 99.244.239.224 as this came up on the various emails and I added this to my ticket for steam to investigate – after all this was stealing.

Down again

I guess when steam finally got around to looking at my question, they took the action of disabling my account – I was back to square one of not been able to play the games I had actually bought. They explained that both people were claiming that they owned the account and needed proof. I filled in another support ticket and took a picture of the serial from the box itself and added this to the ticket.

Back online

Today I got the email back saying they had sorted my account, reset the password and email and hopefully everything was good. I am still to this day worried that if I buy more games that need steam, what is to stop people from hacking it again? I keep seeing people in the forum saying people maybe had weak passwords or they shared there account but I can assure you on this occasion nobody would have any idea what my passwords would be – yet here we see some guy in Canada taking over my account.