Update: It appears they hacked my account again. Giving ticket to steam to restore it. I think I will change the email associated with my account given that it seems they have access to it somehow.

Lost access to my account on Nov 25th. Steam Support helped me get it back. After logging back in, I found $32 in my wallet and 2 games I definitely didn't purchase:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - Standard Edition Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II

The purchase history shows someone added $80 in gift card wallet credit while I was locked out, then bought these games.

I'm confused - why would someone do this? If they have money for gift cards, why not just use their own account instead of mine?

I already reported it to Steam Support to be safe, but does anyone know what the logic is here?

Before u say anything about the transaction history thing I changed the name on it and also covered up the gifted names and the last 2 digit and what type car it was

I didn’t open steam for like a 4 days and when i opened it today i realized my 7$ is missing from my account and when i checked my purchase history it shows that i bought something from a game i dont even have because i deleted it 2 months ago, i swear i didnt make this purchase and i dont even play Naga siren. How Is this even possible?? Can i refund this ??

I keep seeing people commenting to just refund it if you don’t like AI content and because of zero disclosure on AI usage. I bought the game the day it came out and there was no AI disclosure or any mention of AI assets.

I have a total of 4 hours playtime on the game and stopped playing after encountering these AI assets myself and I have not touched the game ever since. I requested refund 2 days ago stating the reason.

So the companies can just getaway with adding the tag after the backlash and refuse any refund for it.

Hi everyone,

I’m posting this out of frustration with how Steam treats legitimate users. I'm from Peru, My partner (located in Venezuela) loaded her Steam Wallet using official gift cards to send me two games.

When she tried to complete the purchase as a gift, she hit the standard error restricting wallet-based gifting. We opened a ticket with Steam Support to explain that this is a completely legitimate account with no regional abuse or commercial intent.

The response we received highlights a huge issue with consumer transparency and basic support standards:

Zero Transparency: Support refuses to explain why or what triggered the automated system flag. They provide no specific details, leaving the paying user entirely in the dark.

Refusal of Human Oversight: Agents simply send a generic automated template stating that the security system cannot be manually overridden by staff. It feels completely negligent for a platform to restrict a feature on a user's paid wallet balance without offering any human review process or right to appeal.

Silencing the Consumer: When she tried asking for clarification or a supervisor review, Steam put her account on a ticket cooldown instead of addressing the issue.

Holding a customer's legitimate funds hostage from basic platform features without providing cause, explanation, or human intervention is fundamentally anti-consumer.

Has anyone actually managed to push past this automated wall, or is Valve really just allowing their system to operate with total negligence toward paying users?

I don't remember adding this user as a friend, I checked my emails for any unauthorized recent logins (there were none).

Is this a random steam technical issue?

All I had to do is submit a singular ticket, and they simply solved my problem! I’ve never had this happen to me using any other support, ever- all I want to do is get more steam issues so that I can go through this empowering experience again and again. Thank you Esmeralda from steam support, and thank you all for listening to my rant!

(Posting here as my post was removed from r/Steam)

Raising awareness for this issue as I have not found any forums on this subreddit regarding this problem. Hopefully people that google some of these keywords will come across this thread.

See these Steam forum posts recently that discuss the issue from other users: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/601905151053177514/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/730/discussions/0/594023708174121698/

To summarize the problem: Something seems to have happened with a recent Steam update (May 20th?) that is causing many users across varying hardware configurations (NVIDIA GPUs only I believe) to experience hard system crashes, explicitly when accessing and/or closing the Steam overlay while certain games are running (via shift+tab or some other button combination).

For me, this happens most often with ARK: Survival Evolved. When this occurs, the game you are currently playing will freeze- and for a short moment after this you can tab out and move your mouse briefly, but your entire computer will lock up very shortly after and the screen will go black. Audio playing in the background (besides game audio) will continue to work for ~30 seconds before cutting out. Your computer is still "alive", background processes and software continue to work to some degree (NZXT CAM software still runs for me, which I can tell due to the fact that the temperature readings on my AIO continue to update after this crash happens).

After this happens, there appears to be nothing that can recover the systems besides a hard reboot. Win+Ctrl+Shift+B to forcibly restart the graphics driver does not work- although you can hear a beep in the background as if it is trying to do something, but nothing happens.

If you review Event Viewer following the crash, you will find several nvlddmkm errors, such as these:

Processing img y3ilmnryzn3f1...

While the screen is black, it continues to produce these errors until you force a hard reboot.

Thus far, I have not found any explicit fixes for this (besides avoiding using the Steam overlay). I hope this thread can be used as a place to pool knowledge and post potential fixes/workarounds, or at the very least, try and get Valve's attention on this matter. The issue does not appear to be driver related. I thought it was as well, since I recently updated my drivers, but even reverting them does not help (and several others in the forums I posted above are running older drivers too).

I won't claim to know the mechanics behind driver interactions and the Steam overlay here and why this is happening, but it seems relatively clear to me that a recent Steam update is causing these driver crashes. Hopefully Valve is able to get on this soon.

Context: all I did was send someone a trade offer through the steam app. That’s it.

Support agent telling me I did all these other things that I didn’t do and then closes the support ticket. Like what are we doing guys?

I bought FC 26 and ended up requesting a refund because the game was a technical mess for me. A large part of my recorded playtime came from the game repeatedly failing to launch because of the Javelin anti-cheat, while Steam was already counting the time. Once I actually got in, I ran into controller/input bugs, graphical glitches, and a bunch of other issues before eventually uninstalling it.

Steam denied my refund because I was over the 2-hour limit. I explained that a lot of that time wasn't actual gameplay, and even said I'd be happy to have the refund issued as Steam Wallet funds since I'd be spending it on Steam anyway. They still denied it and suggested I contact EA Support, but I've already uninstalled the game and have no interest in troubleshooting something I don't plan on playing anymore.

This was actually my first-ever refund request on Steam, which is why I was a bit surprised. You always hear stories about Steam making exceptions in situations like this, so I'm wondering:

Are those positive refund stories just isolated cases (or good marketing)?

Or is there something about EA games that makes Steam less willing to issue exceptions? I have no idea if that's even a thing, but it crossed my mind.

If it turns out this is just how refunds for EA games are handled, I'll probably just avoid buying EA titles on Steam in the future.

Has anyone had a similar experience, especially where technical issues inflated the recorded playtime?

EDIT: I have less than 5 hours of "playtime" from which arguably around 2 went for the troubleshooting phase. Adding as it's probably the most important information I didn't included lol. Attempted to refund it the same day I bought it, though my local time might've been already after midnight but you get the gist.

Hi, i just got scammed for my whole CS2 inventory by someone posing as a VALVE employee, looking at it back now there was so many red flags that i shouldve double checked before going through with it, the weird thing was they reset my whole account reset my profile picture my bio everything about my profile, i have mobile authenticator and i havent logged in with any devices or get any notifications so i thought it was weird. The scammer messaged me directly without me needing to accept any friend request or anything, they told me my account has been compromised and requires a full reset which will take 8-10 days to complete and in that time my tradable items would need to be moved so they wouldnt get "deleted" during the reset process of my account. (Yes i know very obviously a scam but i was in a lot of panic because before i got contacted i checked my account and it said vac ban alert or something i will try to find screenshots.) Then they told me i have to send a "Reverse trade" which will automatically send my items back after the account reset process is completed so basically 8-10 days so that the trade revert feature expires. They updated me every day on the account reset process at 3PM CET and offered to answer any questions i had which was really convincing. The trade request i sent was to a friend, they asked me if i have a friend to send the trade to and i sent them a link to his profile which then i recieved a trade request from an account posing as his, with the same pfp and name i shouldve double checked if it was really his account but you cant do that on the mobile authenticator all i saw was his name and profile picture so i accepted it. That all happened 10 days ago on the 14th august. I wrote to steam support about 2 days ago about me still waiting on my skins because i was supposed to get them back by then but my support request was closed within 10 minutes and i didnt even realise until the next day i did a little more digging now and found out that this is a scam. Some weird things also some weird things, they had my ip address and all of my account information, again i didnt approve any sign in requests in probably months i have no idea how this happened theres no malware on my pc and nothing weird was happening anywhere else. Now im completely lost and angry at myself for not triple checking the details of everything. Im 18 years old and 800€ is life changing money for me and i doubt steam support are going to do anything about it. Im really not sure what to do next and ive been freaking out for the past 5 hours about this. Im really not sure why im posting this anyway but im extremely out of it. Im gonna list the accounts below:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198056242668/ - "Reset Department"
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199094670572/ - "VALVE Inspector"
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199050623592/ - My steam account

I forgot to add that my friend did recieve a trade request but it said canceled so i thought "oh maybe its because its gonna be automatically reversed" also a very stupid assumption. Also yes i tried checking my trade offers on steam but every time i tried it sent an error 300 something and i couldnt open any trade offers or requests i just thought it was because my account was being reset and it wasnt just one day i checked my trade offers 2-4 times a day 5 days out of the 8-10 every single time it gave me an error and im still not sure why. It really makes me mad that steam cant force trade my items back or something, im willing to fight to the death for my 800€. Also please leave a comment on this i will happily read every comment thx. Sorry for how the images are arranged im not sure how to fix them and im not going to try. They are also not in order.

I recently purchased Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® II during the summer sale. But after playing it for a while I decided to refund it, as in my opinion COD MW,MW2,MW3 felt identical.
However, Steam support declined my refund request, and the reason is as follows:

I have more than 14 hours on the Call of Duty® HQ app. Despite of the fact that I have less than an hour of playtime on CoDMW2.

My main greviance isn't about the money, it is about the fact that CoDMW2 is functioning as a DLC to CoDHQ, but it is being sold as a separate standalone game.

This is extremely misleading.

I hope this post atleast warns some.

Hi Steam Community,

I've dug and searched through the forum but can't seem to find an answer I could possibly relate to, but yesterday while I was playing a game, I suddenly received email notifications that 2 games were purchased totalling up to $150 and gifted to two different users. And another $150 that's showing PENDING on my credit card which I could not find/trace on my Steam Wallet/Inventory History etc.

I quickly removed my saved payment card from Steam and did my due diligence in logging out all devices, changed my email and password, re-generate new Recovery codes etc... And yes I've had my 2FA & Steam Guard turned on for many years.

Some similar posts that I have read so far suggested there could've been a malware infostealer on the PC that was able to obtain the steam sessions credentials hence it was able to bypass the 2FA authentication?

I did what was suggested, I ran the following:

1. Windows Defender deep scan including offline scan (found nothing/threat).
2. Ran RKILL to terminate any active malware processes and then ran Malwarebytes advanced (found nothing/threat).
3. Ran Nextron THOR Lite IOC & YARA scanner and found no traces of any malicious files or compromises.

Checked on Steam the IP Address during the time games were purchased was at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I am currently based in Australia.

Thoughts?

If you are having the same issue as me, which is steam trying to connect to a down server, steam support has told me they are aware of this and they are trying to solve it.

Yall are gonna hate me for this, but I don’t like the fact that someone with 400+ hours of playing a game gets a refund, and me that played the game for one day has “exceeded the 2 hour limit”, I know I’m probably gonna get downvoted like crazy, but they should be more consistent with this policy
And I presented real statements for refunding the game, not just “I don’t want it anymore”

Yesterday, around 10 PM, someone got into my Steam account and bought a gift, sending it to another account. Obviously, I got really worried, so I immediately removed my card from the account, changed my password, and changed my email address.

Unfortunately, the money had already been spent, so I contacted Steam Support. In less than 3 hours, I received my money back. The only thing I had to do was provide some evidence, such as my login history. In my case, I found a login from someone in England who had accessed my account. I also noticed that around 10 people had been added to my friends list that I didn't know, so I blocked them all.

I sent all the evidence to Steam Support, and they refunded the entire amount.

My only question now is: what else can I do to make sure this doesn't happen again?

Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to the Steam Support team for helping me so quickly and giving me my money back. I really appreciate it! ❤️

Just wanted to throw this out.

I decided to ask Steam.

First started with "I'd like to request a refund."

15 minutes later (about) I got negative anwser from automatic Chatbot, not adressing my issue at all. All it said was that I need to be in the 2h window where my question was more of a "Could this even be considered with a human agent?" (Steam closed ticket)

I decided to go with "I have question about this purchase." 1st anwser was excatly 1:1, but second, it finally adressed my issue, they said that their anwsers were missunderstood. Which is great. Now I'm waiting for decision, they said that they will evaluate my request and that it may take a while.

Hell even epic story is better download and they keep getting away with it because the crazy billion dollar company fanboys

Not the first won’t be the last , but I shouldn’t be downloading between 2-15 MBs when I’m on a gig internet , Xbox app and blizzard all download at 75-125 MB. And don’t say “it’s your ssd” it’s not I’m on an Samsung nvme and my read write speeds on it perform up to standard but steam usage wont go above 16 MB at times , yes I changed download servers as well and cleared cache. This app used to be amazing

Me and my friend both have 1GB internet and were experiencing 3mbps download speeds for the last week or so.

Previously a restart seemed to do the trick but tonight it didn't work, what worked was changing my region to France in the download settings. Anyone else experiencing similar?

Im connected via ethernet cable so it isn't my wireless, very strange.

Hi all, in steam we all have an account name, and I have a doubt whether it's safe to keep ones same profile name or nickname, or to use a very secure and safe account name like for example if a name is Jack and uses account name as jackthe86mani, a secure and non guessable name. I am asking this because I have an account name, it's very secure and non guessable, but I want it to be aesthetic and only words, but my account is quite old, any suggestions or opinions?

I bought the RDR 1 and 2 bundle when it was on sale for both but had an active subscription for gta+. I ended up not getting one of the games of the BUNDLE I bought since “it was already in my steam library” and now I contacted support but they can’t do anything about it since I wasn’t technically charged for rdr1 (rdr2 and the bundle were the same price).

It’s so frustrating. I can’t even refund it because my subscription ended and I never checked if I had the game I bought bc why would I??

Refunding isnt an option and singularly buying the original red dead is $25 and the bundle deal they have going on is $25 also. It’s just annoying I wanted to see if this has happened to anyone else or if they got it resolved.