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Click Adventure: Difference between revisions

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gutted the ai slop, sourced everything to the sentinels investigation report. fixed wrong removal date (was sep 15, actually sep 12), removed unsourced security concerns and recommendations sections, removed malware speculation (accounts were pre-compromised not hacked through the game). title still needs a rename
 
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Latest revision as of 19:08, 13 April 2026

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  1. limited to a single primary source (Sentinels of the Store); no mainstream coverage exists

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Click Adventure was a fake Steam game used to drain wallet funds from pre-compromised user accounts through the Steam Community Marketplace. Published by "Folso Dev" on August 6, 2025, the game served as a vehicle for laundering stolen funds; around 25 users reported unauthorized transactions totaling roughly $830 before Valve removed the game on September 12, 2025.[1] Valve denied all refund requests from affected users.[1][2]

Background

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The consumer rights group Sentinels of the Store, run by investigator MellowOnline1, uncovered the scheme in September 2025. Their report found that the compromised accounts hadn't been hacked through the game itself; the accounts had been compromised months earlier, then stockpiled for use in the laundering operation.[1] One victim's account had been compromised as early as December 2024, about 8 months before Click Adventure launched.[1]

Click Adventure was a bare-bones clicker game where players clicked to uncover locations & loot. Its SteamDB page shows a peak of 4 concurrent players before removal.[3]

Wallet drain mechanism

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The scam operated in two steps using networks of pre-compromised "seller" & "buyer" accounts:[1]

  1. The operator used compromised "seller" accounts to list worthless Click Adventure inventory items on the Steam Community Marketplace. Each item's price was set to match the exact balance in a specific victim's wallet.
  2. The operator then used compromised "buyer" accounts to purchase those items, transferring funds from the victim's wallet to the seller accounts.

Individual losses ranged from $13 to $205.[1][4] Discussions in the Sentinels community indicated up to 25 total cases; the full count is unknown because not all victims filed reports.[1]

Victims consistently reported that they didn't own Click Adventure & hadn't interacted with it before receiving emails about marketplace purchases tied to the game's inventory items.[1] The transactions didn't trigger Steam Guard alerts because the accounts had already been compromised; the attacker maintained persistent access without triggering new login notifications.[1]

Developer analysis

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Folso Dev had no prior history on Steam beyond Click Adventure, and the SOTS investigation noted the name sounds like "false dev."[1] No verifiable social media presence, support contacts, or external website exists for the entity outside automated Steam database crawlers.[1]

The earliest wallet drain reports appeared after Click Adventure's August 6 release but before a second build was pushed on September 12, 2025, the same day Valve banned the game.[1] The Sentinels investigation concluded that the developer had been accumulating compromised accounts for months before creating the game as a marketplace laundering vehicle.[1]

Prior Steam marketplace fraud

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Click Adventure wasn't the first time Steam's marketplace was exploited for fund laundering. In 2021 & 2022, similar schemes used cheap or fake games to create marketplace items for transferring stolen wallet funds. MMO Fallout documented a pattern of fraudulent Steam games operating the same basic model: create a game, list worthless items at inflated prices, & use compromised accounts to complete the purchases.[5]

Valve's response

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Valve removed Click Adventure from the Steam store after user reports, but didn't provide refunds or compensation to affected users. Steam Support denied all reimbursement requests even though the developer had already been banned by the time victims sought refunds.[1][2]

The Steam Subscriber Agreement places responsibility for account security on the user:

"You are responsible for the confidentiality of your login and password and for the security of your computer system."[6]

Valve denied refunds despite the compromised accounts being used to purchase items from a game distributed through Valve's own storefront.[1]

Community response

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MellowOnline1 launched a GoFundMe campaign on September 18, 2025, to reimburse affected users for their stolen wallet funds.[1][7]

The incident received no coverage from mainstream gaming outlets. All documentation of the scheme comes from the Sentinels of the Store investigation & associated community discussions.[1]

References

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  1. 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 Mellow_Online1 (2025-09-18). "Click Adventure: How a Banned Steam Game Drained Wallets and Dodged Steam Security". Steam Community. Archived from the original on 11 January 2026.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  2. 2.0 2.1 Valve. "Steam Support response to Click Adventure victim". Imgur. Archived from the original on 22 September 2025.
  3. "Click Adventure - SteamDB". SteamDB.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. MellowOnline1 (2025-09-16). "At least 18 users across the world report that their Steam Wallets have been drained". Twitter. Archived from the original on 20 March 2026.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. "PSA: Steam and the Rise Of Unfettered Fraud". MMO Fallout. 2022-03-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. Valve. "Steam Subscriber Agreement". Steam.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. Mellow Online (2025-09-18). "'Click Adventure' Steam Scam Victims". GoFundMe.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)