We've seen an increase lately in the number of unscrupulous people acquiring Steam accounts (and access to Steam games) by stealing them from other users. These people accomplish their theft by simply asking legitimate users for their login information. This practice is known as "Phishing," and is found to some extent in nearly all online account-based systems.

By posing as a Steam official in an email message, or sometimes by pretending to be a helpful user who wants to "trade" one account for another, the thieves are often able to convince people to divulge their user name and password.