striders:

striders:

hey y’all i work a support line for a place that handles money and i just dealt with a young dude who just got scammed through Steam/Discord so fucking bad and i know a lot of my followers are younger so like. pls be careful because this guy is likely out of over $500 that legally nobody can retrieve for him

the scam was:

• rando “accidentally” reports the kid and gets his account frozen on Steam
• rando apologizes and promises to help him get unfrozen, provides “direct contact for an official Steam dev” and gives the kid someone’s Discord handle
• the kid goes and talks to the “dev” on Discord, the “dev” tells him that they just need to verify that he isn’t a bot
• the “dev” tells him to go to a 3rd party exchange site and transfer money with a debit card in the kid’s legal name, promises he’ll send it back

of course the “dev” is fake and the rando who reported the kid is part of the scam ring, and the kid is not going to get his money refunded by the scammer. the issue here is that since the money was willingly sent through a 3rd party transfer service (anything like paypal, venmo, cashapp, etc) the kid has almost NO WAY to dispute these charges, even though he was scammed.