My Steam account disabled!

[chris watton]

When I tried to log into my Steam account yesterday, I was greeted with a “This Steam account has been disable” box.
I have written to them three times since, through their cumbersome 'contact us' procedure, but I have received no response.
I think this is not on, as I received no warning about this beforehand – they have simply blocked my account (and my 100+ games, all paid for) without warning or giving me a chance to resolve whatever it is that needs attetion – this is what really vexes me!

This has now made me very wary of ever buying a game that requires Steam again; it seems they can disable your account without prior notice and without explanation – very frustrating. We never play online games, just single player, and I have all reciepts from PayPal for the games I have bought.

[Cerberus90]

Give them a chance, its the weekend.

[tenohfive]

Cerberus90 said:

Give them a chance, its the weekend.

It is entirely possible that it has been disabled after repeated failed attempts to login - people trying to steal your account (or temporary amnesia on your part.) A ball ache nonetheless, but as pointed out it is the weekend.

[MattyB_]

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?re...

This does worry me too - if your account is VAC banned (this is different from the account being disabled) then you can't use that account to play games online. It is irreversable, no exceptions.

So if I've got £500 worth of games like COD, BF2:BC and others, and it gets banned due to Spyware or a hacked account - thats it. All of those games are useless. The account will work, I can play games in single player, but nothing online. I need a new account and to re-purchase all of the games.

I love Steam, I think its great, but I do get a bit paranoid sometimes...

[chris watton]

MattyB_ said:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?re...

This does worry me too - if your account is VAC banned (this is different from the account being disabled) then you can't use that account to play games online. It is irreversable, no exceptions.

So if I've got £500 worth of games like COD, BF2:BC and others, and it gets banned due to Spyware or a hacked account - thats it. All of those games are useless. The account will work, I can play games in single player, but nothing online. I need a new account and to re-purchase all of the games.

I love Steam, I think its great, but I do get a bit paranoid sometimes...

This is what has been worrying me! I don't play online much at all (usually play the Total War games, GTA4 etc, and the 'girls' play stuff like Puzzle Quest 2, Nightshift Code etc), and we haven’t played Team Fortress 2 since 2007! The only online game we play is Left 4 Dead 2, and I wouldn't even know how to cheat, or even want to!

I know it's the weekend, but to disable my account, which, I would think, has over £500 worth of both retail and Steam bought games linked to it, and not give me any reason why, or warn me beforehand, I think is very bad! It is the sense of utter helplessness that grates too - to think they can stop you playing what you have legitimately bought, seemingly on a whim and no legal comeback!

Edited by chris watton on Sunday 22 August 19:20

[Cerberus90]

If the account has been banned wrongly, and valve acknowledge this, I think they're pretty good at sorting it out and won't mess you about.

But yes, the VAC thing is a bit of a negative point against valve. But then they've got to have rules/limits, granted they could push the limit back a bit.

Just make sure you've got a strong password, infact, I may go and change my steam password now as its not changed since I created the account, .

[chris watton]

It appears my wife emailed PayPal on my last purchase to ask what the payment was for, without asking me first. This seems to have set in motion a payPal investigation, which returned the funds back to us. We did not tell PayPal to reverse the funds!
This is the response from Steam;

"Hello,

A staff member has replied to your question:

Hello Chris, Thank you for contacting Steam Support. The purchase of Puzzle Quest, Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City and NightShift Legacy has been disputed by Paypal. The Paypal account holder will need to close the dispute and have the funds returned to Steam. If the account holder is unable or unwilling to drop the dispute and let the PayPal know that the purchase is valid, and in turn have the funds returned to Steam, we will not be able to reactivate the account. All games on your account are locked to the account and can not be transferred to a different account. A different payment method can not be used for this game; the money must be returned by the PayPal account that made the original purchase. If the dispute is closed and the funds are released back to Steam, the account will be reactivated. However if PayPal closes the dispute by “Reversing the Payment”, meaning they send the funds for the purchase back to you, the Steam account will remain locked and you will lose access to all of the games on the account. There are no options to resolve a dispute once PayPal has closed the case, so we suggest that you contact them immediately. PayPal Help Center https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_help-ex... Please let us know if you have any further questions. We are not able to do anything further with your account while a PayPal dispute is still pending, please remedy this issue with PayPal before asking for the account to be reactivated."

So, there you go, one mistake, and your whole games library is dead!

This was my response to the above;

"Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

We shall get the funds back to you as soon as we can, within the next 24 hours. As I have stated, we did not tell PayPal to reverse the funds in the first instance.

I am very concerned that a simple mistake like this can lose me my entire game library, which you know I have paid for. Because of this blanket disabling of my entire games library, rather than disabling the games that are in dispute, I will not purchase any more games from Steam until the rules offer more flexibility.

A very unhappy Steam customer."

[Bullett]

Looks like paypal messed up, not steam. Don't use paypal in the future!

Although it also looks like you didn't communicate with your wife in the first place because if you had she wouldn't have queried the payment and effectively had your account locked.

A VAC ban is only for the game that runs the same engine. And even then you are not banned from single player or even online (except for secure servers). There has only been one incident that I am aware of that was a false positive and valve reversed these bans when the problem became apparent.

[bordseye]

chris watton said:

It appears my wife emailed PayPal on my last purchase to ask what the payment was for, without asking me first. This seems to have set in motion a payPal investigation, which returned the funds back to us. ........................... I am very concerned that a simple mistake like this can lose me my entire game library, which you know I have paid for.

But thats the whole point. Some of your games have not been paid for and how do you expect them to know what its all about when even you dont know what your wife has done? Clearly your fault not theirs or Pay Pals.

[IainT]

bordseye said:

chris watton said:

It appears my wife emailed PayPal on my last purchase to ask what the payment was for, without asking me first. This seems to have set in motion a payPal investigation, which returned the funds back to us. ........................... I am very concerned that a simple mistake like this can lose me my entire game library, which you know I have paid for.

But thats the whole point. Some of your games have not been paid for and how do you expect them to know what its all about when even you dont know what your wife has done? Clearly your fault not theirs or Pay Pals.

A game, not some. Causing the whole library to be locked. No doubt it was the OPs 'fault' the payment got blocked but the rick of losing a whole, paid for, account is not good practice.

I suspect a legal challenge to this method of witholding access for paid-for goods would fall in the consumer's direction no matter what the ToS happens to say.

[chris watton]

bordseye said:

chris watton said:

It appears my wife emailed PayPal on my last purchase to ask what the payment was for, without asking me first. This seems to have set in motion a payPal investigation, which returned the funds back to us. ........................... I am very concerned that a simple mistake like this can lose me my entire game library, which you know I have paid for.

But thats the whole point. Some of your games have not been paid for and how do you expect them to know what its all about when even you dont know what your wife has done? Clearly your fault not theirs or Pay Pals.

Perhaps it is my fault for the last purchase. However, the payment my wife disputed was not that payment,(after looking carfully at payment dates) and we received a response and that was resolved. This was over a month ago. The games I bought that PayPal decided, not by us, to investigate were bought about a week ago. I can only assume assume PayPal did this due to the earlier query, as we did not at any time question any other payments. PayPal sent an email stating that they were just doing a 'randon investigation', to ensure all was fine. I did not think for one minute they would return the funds back to us, as we had not disputed that particular payment! It seems that when PayPal set something like this in motion, there is no way to stop it. Apparantly, PayPal were waiting for Steam to respond so that they could close the investigation, but they never did.

I am annoyed at the fact that Steam seem to be able to stop me playing my paid for games, rather than disabling the disputed games only. They seem to have a 'We can take all of your toys away from you and there is nothing you can do about it' attitude. I have been with Steam for almost 10 years, and I find the 'tome' of the reply I received very arrogant - treating me more or less like a new user with perhaps one or two games on Steam, I spent almost £300 on Steam over Christmas and the new year, and about £200 more since.

Regardless of who's fault it was in this instance, I still think it's pretty off for Steam to act in this way - but that's just me!

[pugwash4x4]

chris watton said:

Lots of relevant stuff

Agree with all of this!

[eztiger]

I find it interesting that one of the remedial actions offered by steam was not 'we will remove the games from your account if you have not paid us for them'.

Quite shocking.

I share your sentiments, I (despite my hate of all other online DRM infested delivery mechanisms) quite like Steam and I noticed just this weekend my library has spanned to reasonable proportions as a result of their many weekend deals. But I'm very worried about continuing access for whatever reasons.

It sounds like their 'no refunds' policy literally extends to any possible scenario.

edit: glad you got your access back though, and thanks for sharing - I'll certainly be thinking twice next purchase.

Edited by eztiger on Monday 23 August 13:07

[Cerberus90]

Now, this is interesting.

Someone else on another forum I'm on has had exactly the same problem.

although apparently he did nothing and paypal just reversed the payment and won't do anything about it.

[chris watton]

eztiger said:

I find it interesting that one of the remedial actions offered by steam was not 'we will remove the games from your account if you have not paid us for them'.

Quite shocking.

I share your sentiments, I (despite my hate of all other online DRM infested delivery mechanisms) quite like Steam and I noticed just this weekend my library has spanned to reasonable proportions as a result of their many weekend deals. But I'm very worried about continuing access for whatever reasons.

It sounds like their 'no refunds' policy literally extends to any possible scenario.

edit: glad you got your access back though, and thanks for sharing - I'll certainly be thinking twice next purchase.

We have repaid the funds to Steam (I must stress, we never once asked PayPal to investigate this payement - at the beginning of my post, I got it wrong, it wasn't the disputed games that my wife queried - my fault for writing that, I didn't listen to her properly..)

Like you, I have always liked Steam, and the fact that I don't need the game CD's/DVD's to run them - because of this, I never minded too much paying the extra to buy off Steam (Napoleon TW plus add-ons Dragon Age, GTA games etc) However, after this, and the attitude received, I no longer feel confident in purchasing games from Steam or games that require Steam to launch. I never thought for a minute that they would disable ALL of my games, without having the courtesy to inform me of the reasons beforehand, so it could be resolved before disabling my whole account.
Knowing now, that they can do this with apparent legal impunity is quite scary – regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong.

I also use Gamersgate and Impulse, which are quite good and shall buy games I otherwise would have bought on Steam from them. (Although I bought the Assassin’s Creed 1&2 bundle from Gamersgate, and the UbiSoft DRM for AC2 is quite horrific!)

[chris watton]

Cerberus90 said:

Now, this is interesting.

Someone else on another forum I'm on has had exactly the same problem.

although apparently he did nothing and paypal just reversed the payment and won't do anything about it.

This happened to my wife, who runs an online shop. A couple of years ago, PayPal did one of these ‘random investigations’ for a purchase one of her customers made (was about €80 worth of stuff).
She filled in all of the relevant details for PayPal, but the customer didn’t, and PayPal reversed the charges, despite having proof of postage and invoices!
It seems that this time, the boot is on the other foot. It is the feeling of sheer helplessness that grates - for something you didn't start or want!

[Neil H]

I imagine the reason they froze the account was in case it has been compromised - Paypal recall the funds, meaning the account may have been using illegitimate means to purchase games, so they close the account to stop any further activity until they find out what's going on.

It's good practice, in financial terms.

Paypal are a bunch of <insert your favourite insult here>, and seem to be a law unto themselves when dealing with other people's money. I believe they moved their Euro operation to Luxembourg in order to avoid proper regulation.

[Bullett]

Still sounds like a paypal making it up as they go along situation to me.

That said Steam could and should have just disabled the games in question rather than the whole account then emailed you to tell you what they had done. I could understand if they thought there was fraud on the account disabling the whole thing to protect you.

[chris watton]

Bullett said:

Still sounds like a paypal making it up as they go along situation to me.

That said Steam could and should have just disabled the games in question rather than the whole account then emailed you to tell you what they had done. I could understand if they thought there was fraud on the account disabling the whole thing to protect you.

Yes, this is a PayPal cock up. Steam know it is my account, as I furnished them with all the serial numbers of my retail Steam games when going through their support pages.
I still haven's access to my account, and we are trying to get hold of PayPal, as, according to the Steam response, it is not a simple case of paying again. It states that "..if the payment is returned to us and the dispute closed, then your account will stay locked."

How is this legal when I have confirmation and receipts of all previous purchases?

Nightmare!

[chris watton]

PayPal will not open the payment dispute, Steam never responded to PayPal email requests (for of them), so they returned our mony, and I have now lost my account.