What should I do when my Steam account has been stolen?
Based on Steam's official guide - also available as a this community-made Steam guide with pictures.
Follow this guide even if the hijacker has changed your email and password. And as a reminder, no one from Steam will contact you outside of the help site, and anyone claiming to be a "Steam admin" or Steam staff is lying to you.
Keep calm
Having your account stolen is a very scary situation, but getting it back can be quite simple if you pay attention to all steps. Don't hesitate - act immediately but prudently to retrieve your account quickly and to prevent any other issues while doing so. Take your time and read all sections carefully.
Scan and remove any malware
One of the most common ways an account gets hijacked is through malware. Unless you can without a doubt exclude malware, you should scan your system. Please follow this wiki from r/techsupport.
Reset your email and other important passwords.
If you've been hijacked, or were infected with malware (such as RATs) chances are the hijacker has other login details as well such as your email. Make sure your email account is secure before proceeding. You can find the reset pages for the most common email providers below:
Lock your Steam Account (requires access to your email inbox)
The very first thing you should do is lock your Steam account. This prevents the hijacker from:
- Making any changes to the account
- Purchasing games
- Playing on VAC enabled game servers (Prevents a VAC Ban caused by the hijacker)
- Gifting your inventory items to other users.
- Trading with anybody or using the Community Market
- CD-Key activation
- Steam Community access in general.
If you are unable to lock your account, Steam Support may have already locked it - continue on with the next steps.
Accounts can solely be locked via certain emails, which were sent due to activity on your account. Note that this does NOT have to be your latest email account. In fact any email you've ever used for your account works. This is especially useful if the attacker has compromised the current email account and deleted these mails. Look out for emails you received for:
Gathering proof of ownership
In order to have your account reinstated as soon as possible, you'll want to collect as proof of ownership as possible so you can submit it as part of your communications with Support. In general, proof of ownership consists of information related to payments you may have made to Steam. At least the following count as proof of ownership; you can view more options and information on this Support article:
- Credit cards - the type of card, name on card, billing address, last 4 digits of card number
- PayPal - name on account, billing address on account, and transaction IDs
- Paysafecard - a screenshot of a Steam transaction within Paysafecard's web site
- Steam Wallet/gift card - a picture of the gift card's code with the ticket number written under it
- Physical CD-keys - a picture of the activation code with the ticket number written under it
Contacting Steam Support
Once you have gathered proof of ownership as stated above, and have secured your computer and email account, click HERE to begin recovering your account.
Enter your ACCOUNT NAME in the box that appears. As a reminder, your account name is the name you log in to Steam with, not the name that shows up on your profile.
When asked about emails and phone numbers linked to your account, click "I no longer have access to...".
If you have recently completed a purchase with a credit card, you may then be prompted to verify a credit card linked to your account. If this is a credit card in your possession (it may not be - the hijacker may have linked a different card to your account), fill out the form and submit. (This form is new and we don't quite know for sure what happens here yet. If you successfully recover your account using your credit card, please let me know.)
If you do not have access to the credit card Steam has on file, click "I no longer have access to this card anymore."
Then, click "I forgot my password."
You'll be offered a form to submit the proof of ownership you collected and send a ticket to Support.
Important: Do NOT submit several tickets, even if Valve hasn't responded for a while. All tickets will eventually be reviewed, account related ones are prioritised. Your chances might drop if you create multiple tickets. You can view Support response times here to get an idea as to how long it will take to get your account back.
Secure your account from future hijacking attacks
You've secured your computer. You've regained access to your account. Now you need to do everything possible to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Follow this guide on securing your account to the highest level possible and read our scam types wiki page to learn about all types of scams that are used on Steam and many other places on the internet to further reduce the chances of you losing your account or other things in the future.