How Hackers Stole $2 Million Worth Of CS2 Skins
If you’ve played Valve’s competitive shooter Counter-Strike 2 for even a few minutes at any point in the past then you’re probably already aware of the importance of weapon skins in the game. However, you don’t need to be an avid CS2 player to know how much these skins can potentially cost. The fourth title in the Counter-Strike series is no stranger to skins with seemingly surreal price tags, and some of the rarer skins can easily cost you tens of thousands of dollars.
Unfortunately, this rapidly rising economy of CS2 skins is infested with countless scammers. These scammers try to hijack other Steam users’ inventories to steal their virtual items from CS2 and other games that support skin trading. These stolen items are then sold to other innocent users for cash.
This scamming problem in CS2 dates back to the time when skins were first implemented to the shooter, and has been becoming an increasing cause of concern ever since. While Valve has been trying to curb the number of scammers in the community by actively banning their accounts and spreading awareness among its users, some cases still slip through.
$2 Million CS2 Skins Stolen
Recently, reports of a whopping US$2 million worth of CS2 skins being stolen from one of the biggest Steam inventories have surfaced in the headlines, and the news is causing nothing short of chaos in the CS2 community.
The major incident was first brought to light through a recent Tweet by popular CS2 skin trader “ohnePixel”’. He claimed that this was the most expensive Steam inventory with over $2,000,000 worth of CS2 skins including seven Souvenir Dragon Lores, no-star Karambit, and the #1 blue gem Karambit. For the uninitiated, Souvenir Dragon Lores are the most expensive skins in the game, with some of them having price tags north of $100,000. The #1 Blue Gem Karambit is considered to be one of the finest knife skins in the entire game and is estimated to be priced at over $1.26 million.
In his Tweet, ohnePixel mentioned that the original owner’s account was stolen and the skins in the account were either already sold to other buyers or being transferred to the scammer’s inventory.
How Was This Hack Even Possible?
How exactly the account was stolen still remains an unsolved mystery, but Twitter users have come up with several theories about how the scam could’ve taken place. For instance, a user claimed that the hacker could’ve somehow gained access to the Steam username, sent money to the targeted Steam account, and then opened a support ticket claiming the account was theirs. However, this is just a theory and can’t be confirmed.
Shortly afterwards, another renowned CS2 skin trader “zipeL” revealed some more information regarding the incident. As stated by him in a Tweet, the owner of the account didn’t log in to his account for about three years, but had their mobile authenticator active. In fact, their mobile authenticator was active even at the time the account was stolen, but the email and password of the account had been changed. After the account was hacked, its profile name and display picture was changed by the hacker, and the entire friend list of the account got deleted.
Steam Quickly Reverted The Hack
This has been the biggest skin theft in the history of the shooter, and the news spread like wildfire in the CS2 community across social media forums. A few hours later, it was found out that the skins that had been sold from the inventory of HFB (the real owner of the account) started disappearing from the buyers’ inventories. This confirmed the fact that the Steam support was reverting the trade made from HFB’s account. Some users also uploaded screenshots validating the same.
A few hours later, zipeL revealed that every buyer of the stolen items had lost the skins, with the exception of one buyer who had moved a couple of Souvenir Dragon Lores to a storage unit. It’s safe to say that the Steam support had likely reverted all the trades made from HFB’s account by that point.
However, the community soon began to suspect whether these rollbacks would result in huge losses for the innocent buyers, who had purchased the skins from the stolen account.
Impact on Third-Party Markets
As a good portion of these stolen skins was sold on third-party skin marketplaces, some of these markets issued statements and promised to reimburse buyers after verifying that the trades made had been reverted by Steam.
Market CS2 was one of the first marketplaces to issue a statement on the incident.
“We have approached the issue very carefully and our utmost interest is to protect users”, Market CS2 said in a statement. “The administration of ‘Market.CS2’ decided to issue refunds to the affected buyers at its own expense”.
The total amount of compensation that Market CS2 provided to its users was about $242,000. This move was heavily appreciated by users of the marketplace and members of the CS2 community in general.
BUFF163, the biggest third-party CS2 skin marketplace, followed suit and released a statement of their own to address the concerns of its users. In their statement, BUFF confirmed that they had frozen the funds on the seller accounts, and were willing to provide compensation to the buyers who had bought the stolen skins after verifying that the trades had been reverted.
Questioning Steam’s Security
Prior to this incident, the Steam community had not seen a scam of this caliber happening on the platform. The $2 million worth of CS2 skins being stolen and transferred within such a short span of time has sparked heated debates within the community. Moreover, it has also led many people to question the security of Steam and their handling of the users’ accounts. ZipeL also pointed out the same possibility in one of his Tweets.
Hopefully, this incident will encourage Steam to further tighten the security of users’ accounts made on the platform. But for now, the community will have to wait and see whether Steam addresses this issue in the future and whether HFB manages to recover all his losses.
