14 DAY TRIAL // The owner of a Steam bot has managed to recuperate stolen funds and pay back users after reporting that someone had taken all the Bitcoin funds from his Coinbase account, leaving him in the position of needing to use personal funds to reimburse users.
The bot in question is called KeyVendor, which is an automated service that allows users to buy Steam CS:GO (CounterStrike Global Offensive) keys, which they can use to open chests for skins and other CS:GO perks.
KeyVendor's unique feature is that it lets gamers pay for keys using Bitcoin. The bot uses a Coinbase account to handle all the Bitcoin transactions.
The hack... that wasn't
On September 19, Jambo, KeyVendor's owner, posted an announcement on the bot's Steam community page, saying that the bot lost all funds from its Coinbase account, totaling over $15,000.
Jambo blamed the issue on Coinbase. "This was not, however, a direct security issue with the bot, but rather with Coinbase's merchant services," Jambo said, promising to pay back his users. Rumors of a hack quickly followed.
We've seen this many times before, with the owner of a service deciding to close shop and mysteriously disappearing with everyone's funds.
Majority of users got their funds back
Fortunately for KeyVendor users, this was not the case. Two days later, Jambo reimbursed all his users, along with a 10 percent extra on top, just for the troubles. At the time of writing, Jambo told Softpedia that all users received their money back.
Jambo also told Softpedia this was all a technical problem on Coinbase's side, which the payments processor investigated and fixed, and then returned all funds back to KeyVendor.
"Coinbase has investigated this incident," a Coinbase spokesperson told Softpedia. "There has been no breach of our service or storage."