After having 2-3 random friend requests everyday for the past week beginning with strange questions like, "How did you get so many games?" and usually ending with begging, I finally figured out where all of these bottom feeders are coming from.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, my Steam username and avatar are being used on somebody's website for attracting Prize Rebel referrals. Not only is this person using my identity without permission (as one of his happy customers) but he also has a fake quote on his site too which he represents as coming from my lips.

I have no knowledge of who this guy is, I never have had dealings with Prize Rebel, and I most certainly did not give him a quote for his website. His website is http://freesteamgifts.webs.com/.

Now the issue is, how to find out who is responsible for this and have it stopped. I've tried using a whois search on a few different domain registration and lookup sites, but they tend to either return errors or give me the data on the domain which is hosting his free site. I have also contacted Prize Rebel just now, insisting his account there be deactivated (hopefully removing his reason for having the site in the first place) or else I will explore legal options against him and Prize Rebel.

I will contact the domain providing the free site (webs.com) if necessary, but, their complaint form requires a phone number and presumably that is how they will contact me. I much prefer handle my business by email.

If anyone knows of an alternate way of figuring out who is running this domain, or if you personally just happen to know, please let me know so I can get in contact with this scumbag.

Update:

Carefully watching his youtube videos has led me to identify this as one of his accounts.

Update 2:

Sometime this morning Webs.com was good enough to take down the offending website. I have still not heard back from Prize Rebel or from the individual (I tried contacting him by a few different methods). That all is a bit moot now (though it would of course be a bit satisfying to know his referral account was frozen as well), but I am happy with the outcome.

Thank you to everybody who has provided suggestions, information, and/or support.

11 years ago*

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Just change your custom url, and reserve the old one on an alt until the guy stops using it on the website.

11 years ago
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Gotta say this is the weirdest thing I have ever seen. Just aying but some one posted link to that website about some moths ago to me.He said it was legit so I looked.I didn't believe it when I looked but I saw your names then too so they have been up for awhile.

11 years ago
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I suggest removing the URL, you're getting him potential "customers", these are the SG forums.

11 years ago
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yeah if people cant read... lol

11 years ago
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Omg!Leave Ceildy alone!

I will make a small research and will let you know if i find something Ceildy

11 years ago
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Just as a heads up, I went ahead and wrote a message to one of the moderators on SPUF with a link to the webs.com site, this thread, and the whole story asking what I should do re: contacting Valve. He replied back with just a quick message (literally just "thanks"), so I'm going to assume he's forwarded the matter on to Valve/Steam Support. So if webs.com or PrizeRebel don't do anything, Valve's at least been alerted to these shenanigans.

11 years ago
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is SPUF a trusted company or whatever it is?

11 years ago
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SPUF = "Steam Powered Users Forums"?

11 years ago
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then they could be trusted.

11 years ago
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Yeah, sorry. SPUF is short-hand for the Steam forums, the vBulletin ones that existed prior to the newfangled community discussions. The moderators there are quite trustworthy and usually have a more direct line to Valve/Steam than us users. They've been known to forward on scam/phishing sites to the right people before at any rate.

11 years ago
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what an asshole! boo

11 years ago
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tyraarane and then ceildric.. who's next ?

those lolgeneric sentences.. :>

11 years ago
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Wow, this is ridiculous! He's completely made up comments of praise for his shitty scam site. It was very amusing to read what "you" wrote lol. Hopefully Steam can shut that asshole down for good. I'd be just as angry as you, had I been in the same position.

Pro tip for scammers: Never use/overuse the word FREE, it just screams scam.

11 years ago
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Lawyer Time & Internet Police... Damn Lowlife

11 years ago
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What are we, your personal private investigators? This isn't reddit.

11 years ago
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I did not ask anyone to do any of the leg work for me (though a couple of people have been kind enough to do just that). I was mainly hoping to get suggestions on how I could identify the actual registrant of the website (tools, sites, etc for that purpose), thoughts on what else could be done in this situation, and I held out a slim hope that maybe somebody here might even have been familiar with this guy / site (been scammed by them before, knew a friend of a friend that made it, whatever).

11 years ago
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He does bring up a somewhat good point. To the reddit hate machine!

11 years ago
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wow, sorry that happened to you...I hope you get this bastard :D

11 years ago
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Well, Webs.com has taken down the site and other associated sites he hosted at Webs. I'm guessing they got a number of reports from people reading this thread - I know I wrote them one.

11 years ago
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I appreciate that. Thank you and anyone else that reported him. Also more generally thanks to everybody for offering suggestions and support (I'll add this to the main post too).

11 years ago
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Most excellent--thank you for letting us know.

I'm hopeful that his PrizeRebel account's been (or will be) suspended as well, so he doesn't feel inclined to start this again with another hosting service. Or if he does, that he's at the very least learned his lesson about fraud and impersonation. I'd hate for this to turn into a game of whack-a-mole.

11 years ago
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Hey Bro, Cool Story!

11 years ago
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Glad to see the site down, you did the internet a favor ceildric.

11 years ago
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Closed 11 years ago by ceildric.