The owner of the Steam bot managed to recover stolen funds and reimburse users after he was notified that someone had taken all of the Bitcoin funds from his Coinbase account, leaving him in the position of having to use his personal funds to return them to users.
The bot in question is called KeyVendor and it is an automated service that allows users to purchase STEAM CS: GO (CounterStrike Global Offensive) keys, which they can use to open chests for skins, while also offering other CS: GO perks.
KeyVendor’s unique feature is that it allows players to pay for keys using Bitcoin. The bot uses a Coinbase account to handle all Bitcoin transactions.
On September 19, Jambo, the owner of KeyVendor, posted an announcement on the Steam community page about the bot, saying that the bot had lost all funds from his Coinbase account, totaling over $15,000.
Jambo blamed Coinbase. “This was not, however, a direct security issue related to the bot, but rather related to Coinbase’s trading services,” Jambo said, promising to reimburse his users. Rumors of a hack soon followed.
We have seen many times in the past, the owner of the service deciding to close a service and mysteriously disappearing with everyone's money.
Luckily for KeyVendor users, that didn't happen here. Two days later, Jambo reimbursed all of its users, along with an additional 10 percent, just for the problems.
Finally, Jambo told Softpedia that it was a technical issue on Coinbase's part, which the payment processor investigated and fixed, and then returned all the money back to KeyVendor users.
“Coinbase has investigated the incident,” a Coinbase spokesperson told Softpedia. “There was no breach of our service or storage.”
