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It looks like Valve is changing its policy on item recovery for trade scam victims. Ever since trading was implemented on Steam, phishing and scams have become a bit of a problem but up until now if you let Valve know, they would reverse the transaction, keeping your potentially valuable items safe.
However, Valve just updated its Scamming FAQ, detailing the new policy: “Our community assigns an item a value that is at least partially determined by that item's scarcity. If more copies of the item are added to the economy through inventory rollbacks, the value of every other instance of that item would be reduced.”
“We sympathize with people who fall victim to scams, but we provide enough information on our website and within our trading system to help users make good trading decisions. All trade scams can be avoided.”
Now it is worth noting that most Steam scams are easy enough to spot and you probably shouldn't click any links to unknown sites sent to you by strangers, regardless of what platform you are using as that is just asking for trouble. Anyway, if you accidentally fall for a scam now, it looks like Valve is leaving you on your own.
Heck if you really need it, there are even guides to avoiding common scams on Steam, like this one, HERE, which the above image is taken from.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Trade scams can be easy to avoid by not clicking dodgy links or just not accepting friend requests from strangers. Valve appears to be taking a tough love approach to the situation now so Steam market users are going to have to be more careful going forward.
So not content with steam which is basically a license to print money and the completely imaginary market which they make tons of money out of from literally nothing, they can’t assign the resources to protect their users?
I get it that it’s possible to educate your way out of it but for everything that I’m an expert in I originally started out and made some n00b mistakes with it.
When it’s in their favour, they soon stop the gift trading so people can’t get cheap games. When its poor kids or just plain idiots then you’re on your own. The amount of brains in your head is largely the result of your luck in the genetic lottery. Punishing people because they haven’t taken the entrance exam seems harsh to me.
I haven’t done these kinds of trades recently but it seems like the solution is to improve the trading system not turn their backs on people. I can envisage a pre-trade report screen with things like “this item is rare and worth X normally, your trade is unbalanced”, “this person has changed their name recently to the same name as somebody else on your friend list”, “this person has only had an account for 24 hours”, etc.
Then lock the item from being traded on for 24 hours or so. Allow the trade to be reversed.
And even then, even if the person really doesn’t deserve it, still help the poor idiot out if they really are poor idiots. This is a gaming system. People are here to have fun. You’re making money out thin air with virtual items. Don’t be massive tools about it.
The trading system now has email verification on each trade on top of the three step verification in-client. So they have kind of bent over backwards to help people make sure they really do want to make a trade.
I find it hard to have sympathy when there is such extensive information about how Valve contacts users etc
The deeper reason why Steam is doing this because people know if your items get stolen once steam support normally gives it back, but not the second time, therefore some users exploited this by pretending to be scammed and getting rare expensive items back from steam support, they would simply trade items to a friend/someone they trusted who immediately quick sold the items, meanwhile 1 week later steam support would give the ‘victims’ items back but these items would be considered ‘duped’ as in duplicated by steam support. How can people know items are duped? can be checked by the original id of the item via backpack scanners or trade sites. This crashed the rare item community as most legit traders use real life money to purchase items from trusted noteable traders with extreme rep.
Valve stated many times they do not care about rare items value in TF2 economy, they simply think of it as another item, however knowingly advertising in their crates as ‘a rare item’.
What valve should delete the stolen/hijacked items, to teach the scammers and phishers a lesson.
As for creating money out of thin air is a skill for valve, they make back 25% of what gets sold on the market therefore increasing crate drops in 3 of their most popular games. Remember Gabe became a billionaire during the recession.
i seen the ammount ppl drop on them fucking weapon crates and skins on cs:go the least valve could do is help you out if you get scammed -_-
all they care about is the money. like they said, they don’t want to flood the market with returned (read duplicated) items that would then reduce the value of said item in the market, mostly because when those items are sold they get a percentage of every transaction.
I recently got my steam account hijacked and all my items stolen from me, i reported it for about a week or two already and yet they have not replied me. It is not scam as i had no control over my account and the hijacker did the trade. I feel like they should at least reply people to find out if they were scammed or hijacked, and that at least give a chance to those who encounter it the first time and warn them about such scams.
If people fall for the kind of obvious scamming tactics in that forum post then it really is their own fault. By refusing to bail people out of their stupidity, Valve ultimately is going to force stupid people to shape up and that will mean these incidents will go down eventually. Coddling people who fall for the simplest scamming tactics doesn’t help anybody, really.
My account got hacked like 8 weeks ago
I made a Steam report immediately after
But up until now, I have not received any replies from them steam support yet
I am still waiting.
No your account didn’t get “hacked” – you were probably careless with the password somewhere. Hacked and having poor password management are two entirely different things.
this happend to me to more reccently aswell as taking my skins they stole 75 pounds because of my paypal was automaticlly saved on it value did nothing to help and even the bank messaged me about the new ip i was withdrawing the money from which i had no idea but for valve still not enough evidence