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.
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.
Never buy anything used without first purchase receipt
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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.
You’d just pair it with your Steam account just like you do with phones to your carrier. The transaction in this case would require releasing the Deck from the current owner before buying (which could be verified easily, perhaps with a serial or something).
I guess you could do it with an NFT, but just involving Steam in the transaction (registering a new account) would absolutely work.
That said, I don’t want that because that would just turn stolen Decks into ewaste. I’d rather my stuff get used than tossed in a landfill.