Beware of Phishing Scam

Friend of mine got hit. He initially sent me a message stating something along the lines of,

"Hey, did you see what they are saying about you in the community?"

Then it was a link to steamcommunityforums.com/something, sadly my steam crashed and I lost it all. No, I didn't click, and no, I didn't log in as it told me to. Its pretty easy to tell its a bad link, but sadly one of my friends fell prey to it. He logged back in (as himself) a few minutes later and I told him about the link being shot through to me. He could be lying but he's seemed a pretty legit guy, so don't click any odd links and log into any odd sites.

I know stuff like this shouldn't have to be said, but people do silly things for various reasons, stress, weariness, etc pulling their attentions away from what seems like common sense.

Some time ago I had a link to this topic on SR to create awareness: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/how-to-recognize-hijacking-sites.5772/

We do throw messages out regarding this, but if "its always there" the ppl wont read it.

at irregular intervals I do something with a subject, and throw out a manual and warn the ppl on it. Things like this have our attention.

As for your friend, with steamguard no unknown can get on the account, unless the phishing was successfull, the first thing they do is change email/password so its not accessible to the real owner anymore. So the one you talk to, IS the hijacker/phisher. Only after the route via Steam support a owner can get their account back, which takes anywhere between 4 days and 2 weeks.

That does make sense, though this friend seems like the type to have his email recoveries hooked up to phones and whatnot, something I also do so I can quickly regain access to my email accounts in the case of someone hijacking my email (its happened before to me, not for Steam though). I'll hope he has things figured out, but either way, I wanted to warn people a bit since I've seen a lot of people being reported for phishing links all around the steam community.