Russian-speaking YouTuber Mzk revealed a fraud involving Valve's support employee working with a scammer. They were allegedly restoring old inactive accounts and selling their inventories. The video came out on Mzk's channel, available with English subtitles.
His source is a person named Aleksandr, who reportedly did the whole scam. it started after a supposed Steam employee, mentioned as "Steam Help," began trading personal information for a "serious price." Aleksandr contacted him, and they came up with the idea of using old inactive accounts to sell the items.
They chose 5 or 10-year-old accounts. The steam employee could get access to login, first email, phone number, and other detailed data. He had no access to the password, so the scammers were restoring them, pretending to be the owners. They also checked if an account was bought on a third-party platform and not properly registered. Supposedly, the Steam employee could use a data as old as 15-years to do it.
The YouTuber showed some transaction history screenshots from Buff, a popular website for selling skins. Mzk claims these pictures show the stolen skins, totalling around $320k. But these were only the "cheap skins." To sell the expensive ones, the scammers contacted big traders, such as Zipel or Anomaly. The latter came to the comment section to partially confirm the story. Zipel also had a tweet that fits in line with Mzk's words.
Mzk provided one example. NAVI's player Valerii "B1T" Vakhovskiy has one of these skins, M4A1 | Howl. The YouTuber claimed he found the initial owner of the skin and shared his steam profile screenshot. In the video, he showed the story of the item transactions after the theft and how M4 ended up in his inventory. Overall, the video contains a lot of evidence of similar cases.
The scammers weren't the only ones who allegedly used this scheme in Steam Support. At some point, Aleksandr tried to fight his competitors with some success. He and the Steam support employee stole items for about a year until they tried to steal from "someone with strong connections." "If you see an expensive skin that was traded for about a year ago, and his owner's account was deleted, there's a 95% chance it was stolen from a restored account," concluded Mzk at the end of the video.
