It was a stolen unit. As the article says, best course of action is to go back to eBay and report it.
I only wonder if there is something a potential buyer can do beforehand to check if a unit is in good standing with valve.
Never buy anything used without first purchase receipt
When you purchase something on the steam store you get an email with the recipe. If your email client is somewhat decent you should be able to find it in a couple of seconds.
A digital receipt is pointless as they can be faked very easily. Each steam deck would need to come with an NFT or something.
Would a BIOS password with FDE make a stolen steam deck useless? I haven’t gotten my hands on one to test yet.
The BIOS doesn’t usually handle encryption, that’s usually the bootloader on the drive itself. They could just reformat the drive with the standard Valve image and they’re good to go.
It could protect your Steam account though, so if you’re worried about them making illegal purchases or something, it can help somewhat. But most thieves aren’t that sophisticated, they just want to resell it for quick cash.
In order for the BIOS to work, you’d need to have some kind of cryptographic link with the boot media, something that the standard Valve image wouldn’t satisfy. But let’s say you do that for your own device, all that does is annoy the thief, it’s not going to prevent the thief from stealing your device. Now if every Steam Deck did that by default, maybe thieves would be less interested in stealing it, IDK (probably not, I doubt Steam Decks are popular enough for thieves to now how stealable they are).
I personally don’t see the point. Steam Decks typically don’t have sensitive, personal data on them that needs to be wiped, so bricking them doesn’t benefit the original purchaser being a small amount of “justice” at knowing the thief just stole ewaste. I’d rather a thief resell it and someone get to use it than it just be tossed in the trash.
Not getting OEM repairs on used products period isn’t mind blowing, ignoring that it’s stolen.
I disagree, used products should get the OEM warranty just the same. The unit is the same age regardless.
Theft is the big issue here. Steam should have the ability to blacklist units just the same as cellphones, but at the same time, buyers need to have the ability to check for theft at the time of purchase via serial number.
Why? But regardless, the product was beyond warranty, and not getting warranty service on a stolen device is normal.
Steam having the ability to blacklist devices massively compromises their value. The completely open nature of the device is a big part of what they advertised and how they sold it.
You poor Americans. Product isn’t even 2 years out of release and you accept that as a decent lifespan for an electronic device like this.
Likewise warranties exist to guarantee the quality of product, there’s no reason the company should be absolved from that simply because the user has changed.
They’re lucky it wasn’t just bricked remotely when reported.
It’s honestly surprising they don’t do that
They could probably blacklist it from getting SteamOS updates through their servers, but actually bricking it would involve taking away from the “it’s just a PC” nature of the device.
TIL…
I just assumed laptops would get bricked if reported stolen like a phone or console, but apparently they don’t?
This actually makes a Steam Deck a huge target for theft