Valve Adds Scam Protection to Steam Trades

Interstellar

1471

After Two games being used to pawn fake Steam Community Market items: Abstractism, which was being used to peddle fake Team Fortress 2 items, and Climber, which was doing the same thing but with fake Dota 2 items. Valve has introduced new trade protections to protect Steam users from scams like these.

A GitHub archive of the Steam Database (spotted by Reddit user wickedplayer494) shows two warnings which now appear during "suspicious" trades. The first warns players if "one or more of the items you're receiving in this trade come from new games on Steam," which will help filter out slapped-together cash-grabs.

The second warning comes with: Players will also be notified if they are offered items that "come from games that you have never played." This warning could have prevented the scams pulled by Abstractism and Climber, and should prevent similar ripoffs going forward.

"We also started requiring approval for app name changes, and have more planned to address this sort of problem that we couldn't get done in one day," Valve engineer Tony "Drunken_F00l" Paloma said. "We are hopeful that having to dismiss two warning dialogs will be sufficient to make people think twice about trades containing forged items, but this is not the end of our response, and we'll continue to monitor, of course."

Paloma also said Valve intends to restore or recover items "for anyone who was tricked by this scam prior to the warnings being in place." Despite The Steam Community Market FAQ saying "You will not have any right to a refund or a reversal of any Community Market transaction once it is completed", returns will be offered after all.

Source : Valve

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Replies • 48

leopoldovich

Lunar

I had no idea people were still getting scammed trading TF2 items. What is this? The year 2009?

Hoazo

Interstellar

Do the items from those non-Valve games look similar to the items that come from TF2/DotA2 or something? I've never traded with someone I didn't actually know so I'm at a loss as to how these scams work.

Suléimano

Casual

leopoldovich said:
I had no idea people were still getting scammed trading TF2 items. What is this? The year 2009?

This was a clever tactic.

The shovelware developers that make intentionally trash games for profit, tried a scheme where they would replicate an existing item, like a TF2 australium weapon worth 20$-120$ or so, and they would make it look identical and trade it for the same price as a real one.

Of course, the item is a fake, it belongs to the game they made, and not TF2, but there are barely any differences between them, and this could've been a genuine scam attempt that could fool even veteran steam users, including myself had i not known about it.

Valve after a few hours later, shut down those developers and their items, and implemented the scam protection thing that this article references it.

This is not your run of the mill bait and switch scam or similar scam attempts that everyone knows about them. Steam's system gets exploited constantly and people always come up with new ways to scam people, it's not like people are still using 2009's tactics of scamming others. Those clever mofos evolve with the system.

edited