Scams, hoaxes, and data manipulation are growing more and more prevalent online as scammers find new ways to take people’s money and/or data. We like to laugh at people for falling for scams we see as obvious, but the truth is that if you’re not extremely cautious and knowledgeable of their tactics, you can easily be a victim of an online scam or hoax. Although I consider myself to be relatively internet-savvy, as I have spend a good amount my years on it, I have fallen victim to a scam once, and while I didn’t lose too much money, I was still taught a valuable lesson.

It was the night of November 10th, 2022, and I was just chilling and playing video games in my room, when all of a sudden I recieved a message on the social media app Discord. It was from someone I didn’t know, so I was about to disregard the message when I started reading what they sent. The person was profusely apologetic, saying they accidentally reported my Steam account for stealing. I don’t remember the exact story they gave me, and I can’t access the chat logs since they deleted their account, but I do remember it somehow circling around to me needing to give them Steam codes or else my account would be deleted, with the promise that they’d “pay me back”. This was late at night, maybe 10 or 11 pm, so my brain wasn’t really working at full capacity, and I gullibly believed them. I sent them a $5 code hoping it would fix the issue, but they said they needed more. So, in one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made, I tried going into my mom’s room to use her credit card, with the justification that it would be paid back. Thankfully she woke up, and put an end to that nonsense right then and there. Until then, it hadn’t dawned on me that it was a scam at all. I got a stern talking to, went to bed, woke up, and found my Steam account hacked. I don’t even know how they accessed it since I didn’t give them my password, but the name and profile picture were changed, and I couldn’t log back in. I had recieved a text from my friend saying he was also hacked, and that he had paid the scammer $210 in Steam cards.

Thankfully, my Steam account was recovered, and at least I didn’t get scammed as badly as my friend did. However, I still fell for one, and in retrospect, there were many ways I could have identified that this was a scam. Firstly, being messaged by an account with no profile picture or bio (as far as I remember) should have been red flag number one. Secondly, this person wasn’t typing normally, but rather in textboxes like they were copying and pasting text from a file they had used numerous times to scam people. And lastly, the most obvious identifier that this was a scam was that they were asking for Steam gift card codes, with the excuse that they needed it for verification. It should have dawned on me that maybe my account wouldn’t have gotten deleted even if I was falsely reported, and that sending them gift card codes wouldn’t have changed it either way.

So, the moral of the story is to not fall for people asking for gift card codes, and to not put your Steam profile on your Discord account. And remember, if it seems like a scam, it most likely is.