"Basically he demanded that I trade my unusual to my friend so he could have some sort of 'report'."

lmao?

People need to think about hats like real money.

Be carefull when you trade stuff guys.

I have a 500$ unusual and i think there is at least 5-6 scammers who add me everyday. Just dont add them on Steam. (Use steam trade system, which is safe)

Also, when your done doing business with a stranger, remove him from your friend list.

Some guy tried to do this with Karl and me but the way he did was after Karl traded me his earbuds, the scammer added me and told me to give the items back to Karl. The fake account had his same profile picture and name but with a "." at the end. The way he managed to trade me without adding me with the fake account is he invited me to a group chat between him and that account. I guess you can do that with group chats.

Let me get this straight. This scammer dude figured out that you like to trade with this firefly guy often enough that it wouldn't seem weird for said scammer dude to make an alt and trade firefly for his whole inventory? I'm not saying you're an idiot but dude.

Did I miss something? :O

It didn't really occur to me at the time, because I just thought the guy was being like super cautious. So I just went along with it because I was doing some scrims, and its Hellbent, we talk and swap things all the time. Then my shit was gone with Hellbent's unusual and the guy removed and probably blocked us.

I'm an idiot.

I dont know, it happened to my friend and it was very similar, but it was not a glitch, it was pure social engineering, he also said he didnt notice it was a different guy, but in stuff like this if its the first time you are facing this situation you might fall for it and not even notice, and then you think everything through in your head and find every possible explanation on why it couldn't have happened to you.

If it was a glitch I don't know why he bothered creating alt accounts replicating your friends profile, doesn't make much sense, if he did create (which the same happened to my friend) it was to deceive you into thinking you were trading to the right person, it's the most logical explanation and from what I know from my friends' situation it was what happened.

We did a couple tries to replicate what could have happened and basically there's a few possible ways.

It's most likely that the scammer made the alts and invited firefly and the hellbent alt he's controlling to one group chat while being in another group chat with hellbent and the firefly alt. While in a group chat, it's possible to send trade offers to anyone in the chat without necessarily being friends with them or being in a small steam group together.

I'm honestly kind of surprised someone didn't try this on a large scale earlier but it might explode into a big thing since a moron like that managed to pull this off.

this is one of the reasons why I quit trading

cant trust anyone on the internet anymore i guess

just be careful guys, I got a tight group of friends that always trade and lend things amongst each other and recently I have been getting a lot of messages of this happening with my pals. There has also been a lot of phishing attempts and other bullshit amongst us.

The nickname thing is really nice and it works. If you really want to be safe, try to avoid trading in game. Shits crazy lately.

There's a command called:
cl_trade_steamid
Which allows you to trade with a specific steamid. Never used the command myself but I guess this would avoid the problem of not knowing who you are trading with.

Best rule of thumb I can think of is when trading with your "friends" you should make sure they really are your friends. This type of scam where they impersonate your profile isn't all that new, I've heard of it from like 2 years ago. But it is sneaky how he impersonated both your account and your friends account.

Sucks man, hope you can get a steam ticket to support it, as long as you can find the accounts that impersonated you. tf2outpost.com keeps logs of pretty much everywhere an item goes, and so does tf2items.com, so you can usually find the "middleman" accounts that jacked your items and see where they ended up.

If it interests you Hellbent I'd be happy to give you one of my unusuals if you feel it can compensate for the one you lost. This whole thing seems really unfortunate and it sounds to me like anyone could've fallen for it.

If you want it hit me up.