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There has been a lot of doubt surrounding the legitimacy of keys sold on the cheap at third-party marketplaces like G2A or Kinguin recently as more and more publishers wise up to fraudulent keys and begin to pull them from the accounts of those that paid for them.
Bethesda is the latest to do this, as the company has begun deactivating Elder Scrolls Online accounts. It turns out that much like in the Far Cry 4 case last year, many ESO keys were purchased using fraudulent or stolen credit cards and then re-sold on these grey markets.
In a post on the Elder Scrolls Online forums, Community Manager, Jason Leavey posted: “We’ve recently seen an increase in the sale of fraudulently obtained digital game keys for The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited. We want to remind gamers to shop wisely and only purchase online keys from a reputable source. Fraudulently obtained keys obtained via Steam and then re-sold via third-party websites is a violation of both our and Steam’s Terms of Service. We will be deactivating all game accounts created with such stolen keys starting on Tuesday, May 26th. Affected users will receive an email with instructions on how to regain access to their game account via a valid game purchase.”
The post then supplies a long list of ‘official retailers', which you can view, HERE.
These cases appear to be popping up much more frequently. Last year Ubisoft had to deactivate thousands of Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed keys due to credit card fraud. However, following backlash, Ubisoft reinstated the keys for everyone and took the financial hit. It is worth noting that the company was not in a good position PR-wise at the time as AC:Unity launched with a horrible onslaught of bugs and issues, some of which remain unfixed to this day.
Earlier on last year, thousands of Sniper Elite 3 keys were also deactivated, which led to some controversy.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: I have been trying to warn readers against grey market sellers for a while now. On the one hand, part of being a smart consumer is shopping around for a good deal, unfortunately, when buying from a marketplace like G2A or Kinguin, there is no system in place to ensure that the key is legitimate. While you might be able to activate the key, you won't know where it originated and it seems that buying in bulk with stolen payment details or nabbing codes out of retail boxes is a fairly common practice.
Let us know if any of you were affected by the ESO key deactivation's. It does seem like an odd move from Bethesda considering the game's waning popularity.
So, I pay £40 for a key online, my account gets disabled, im £40 down…. Fuck you Bethesda
It’s not Bethesda’s fault, it’s the retailer who sold you the key.
Stop buying stolen products and you won’t have this issue. Why should a company lose thousands of dollars to save you $20?
I was sold a fraudulent key from G2A, luckily I took the insurance and was sent a new key, so far that one still works.
It’s crap, Bethesda was quite happy to accept the key and extra payment from me in the form of ESO plus membership as I liked the game (read subscription here) and then cut my account without even the courtesy of an email first. Like the first poster said FUCK YOU BETHESDA, wont be entertaining any more of your software.
People like you are deluded… A multi million dollar company loses spare change and takes it out on the lower/ middle class who fund them. I chose to pay 40 instead of 60 because no one in their right fucking mind would pay 60 for an MMO which will go f2p in a year.
For once I agree with Bethesda’s decision.
AND FOR ONCE DONT CHICKEN OUT OF IT LATER ON.
These idiots DESERVE to be told that they cant play with stolen goods.
Its because that money goes to some fraudulent people. you are the only one to blame. next time use legitimate sources. And there are a lot of cheap legitimate sources, starting with GmG, which has a lot of sales all the time, obviously Steam, the humble bundle/store. Take your pick.
because you brought a stolen key
a key that was stolen from a legitimate seller (either through someone hacking into the legitimate sellers systems or people buying keys with stolen cards that then have the charge challenged)
next you are going to wonder why companies get pissy over piracy (hint: in both instances the company gets 0 money)
you brought a stolen key (literally stolen not just brought from russia and sold at a profit but actually stolen either by buying the key with a stolen credit card (and the charge being reversed) or compromising a legitimate sellers (like greenmangaming) systems and stealing the keys that way – that sort of thing is what happened with sniper 3)
Bestheda still gets their money and the bank eats the lose. thats how it works. my mother worked at a bank fraud department.
Aw look, more people jumping on the hivemind bandwagon. Acting as if, if you got offered something for nothing you wouldn’t take it because “its wrong” piss off. This is the internet incase you hadn’t noticed. Pirates are left right and centre, if you put something on the internet, you’ve lost control of it, You’d all realise that if you had a clue what you are talking about…
not if the key is stolen through someone compromising a server the keys are on
some of us didn’t know the keys were stolen, so maybe you should relax.
I have the same problem but got a refund, didn’t think it would happen to me till it was to late. NOT everyone looks for a fraud key. Hell my friend got from g2a AND never got the email, just my luck.
And i saved 60$
Mine worked till i got the email, just because it accepted doesn’t mean in a month you wont get another email.
Im just going to buy it from the site.
than i wont have anymore problems.
Thats not what they said. its stolen cards or whatever crap they try to say.
Some of us, didn’t expect our keys to be fake.
Like me, My friend said it was a good site and SHE never got the email, but i did.
So its all about luck which is fruad and whats not.
Were not all idiots, some of us just cant afford 99.99 for a game.
Half and half, even ubisoft took the hit and let the kids have a key for free.
They didn’t know , like we didn’t know.
I think they should take the hit, since the only one losing money is the bank from the fraud department.
i know but if you remember the sniper 3 revoking all the keys it was because someone stole the keys from a legitimate seller
you brought stolen goods
you have no legal right to those goods
if you were to buy a second hand laptop/phone/car/console/PC/anything and it turns out it was stolen that thing will be taken off you (if whoever owns it/the police find you have the stolen item that is) and you will get nothing back even if you spent thousands on that item you have no legal right to the item or any compensation
I’ve never seen this level of blindness. So when game companies crack down on pirating shame on them? Kid grow up. You know dam right, or will learn, that buying from shady places always comes with risks. Hence why amazon on the top of the list to buy any products and why G2A or Kinguin will make you think twice about those £40. Comes with the territory. You got screwed £40 then you should’ve bought it or pirate the dam thing like you mentioned. To think you are entitled for stolen goods just makes you look like you got peanuts in your head.
Last time this happened with Ubisoft I think G2A blamed Ubisoft for deactivating the keys. They did not assume responsibility as they should have if they wanted to have a good reputation. Ubi did their job in protecting their investment, G2A did a lousy job in protecting their customers. Now with the refunds they are making up for last years deal.
then now you know that G2A is not reliable and you will not buy from them again. lesson learned.
I dont care if bethesda gets the money or not. this isnt the point. the point is that you’re cheating the system and deserve to be purged from it.
Youre buying keys meant for poor countries and you expect to get away with it? no.
I think this is perfectly fair and I wish they stick to it.
That’s not how it works, saying it’s okay since it’s not your money is not ethically correct. They shouldn’t take a hit for other peoples disregard to their investment. Just because someone has money, it is not okay for you to mess up and let others cover your mistake.
Barry Clark, what actions do you own up to and say it was your responsibility?
obviously, I still think ESO should lower the cost to buy the game.
wow dude calm the fuck down, ESO gets there money either way, the banks the one losing. I didn’t say hey i know its fraud lets go buy a fake key. I didnt mess up.
The person buying the keys and selling them fraud he messed up.
I’ve already bought the game from the website, i just wanted to save money since i bought mine for 30$ and Im the only one out of my friends who are actually losing the keys. They didn’t get fraud keys at all.
Not my mistake, no ones covering for me.
Also, there losing a lot of fanbase, because half of them got banned and some of them got no warning.
I at least got warning.
No ones cheating a system, we wanted cheaper keys because the prices are outrageous like taric’s gems.
Out of ten friends, IM the only one from g2a who got the fraud key.
None of them even got the email , and playing right now.
My luck is outrageous.
Its 50/50 he bought the key yes, but the sellers responsibility to sell legitimate keys to customers.
Not everyone goes, Im going to go buy a fake key today herp a derp.
well atleast i didn’t.
I, like a lot of other people looked for a deal as we always do to try and save money, in my case I thought the supplier was legit, they returned my money already and stated the following:
“I’m very sorry to hear of the issue that you have encountered
with your purchase. There certainly hasn’t been any untoward activity on our
part but clearly something has gone wrong at some stage in the supply chain.
We will investigate this with ZeniMax and get to the bottom of
it. In the meantime, we have issued you with a full refund.
Sincere apologies for the inconvenience this will no doubt have
caused.”
I was upset that the first I hear of this from Bethedsa is my account being shut without even an explanatory email. End of the day they excepted the code and also excepted a subscription tied to it for several months so at least talk to me before closing me down.
Anyway that’s all I’m going to say on the matter so fuck of and troll another topic!
yes you are. The reason you get cheaper keys is become they come from poorer countries.
Companies make an effort to make games available there and you are just exploiting this.
Kinguin and G2A have become synonymous with these issues. It’s not like this is the first time this has come up with them as the main sites having the keys revoked. Either risk your money on those sites or buy from reputable sellers.
I’m glad that something is being done about this problem. If everyone says “just let it be” then the scammers will just keep at it profiting off our laziness. While I see this method as only a stop gap, I can only hope that a more reliable and punative system is put in place. One that can identify these scammers and shut them down permanently.
Way to go Bethesda. Punish the people who thought they’d bought genuine keys rather than the stores which sold them. My crystal ball for next year says your latest headline will read “So, why did everyone pirate Fallout 4?”
you obviously didn’t get the reference. or my sarcasm.
Chill out.
Like I said I didn’t know till today, all my friends have it, not one of them got the bad key, I however did.
And yet GmG (GreenManGaming) was taken to task by CDPR for sourcing Witcher 3 keys from other suppliers, so that’s not exactly always going to be the best site.
I got caught in this issue with TESO after buying a key from cdkeys (TESO is a slight anomaly, because the prices went down at all sites prior to bumping back up when tamriel unlimited was announced) – I contacted them and it’s being refunded to me, without any problem. I’ll buy a boxed copy from Amazon, the cost is little different to what I paid in the first instance, however the digital prices, well that story is a little different, isn’t it?
With regard to sales and price falls over time, I see little drop in digital sales compared to box sales, Skyrim was full price on Steam well over a year after it’s release, TESO is still £49.99 at Steam, Gamersgate, 2game, gamesrocket, Direct2Drive (69.99 for Imperial edition, in line with the other stores), Humble Store, and Greenmangaming, to show just a few from the ‘allowed reseller list’, probably again taking advantage of selling keys for the original subscription TESO that likely didn’t sell particularly well.
Now that we know that all those ‘legitimate’ stores are selling that game at full digital price – i.e. just the code, you download it, rather than the cheaper but more expensive to distribute ‘boxed’ copy price, for instance at Amazon UK of £35, can people start to see why digital distribution isn’t the panacea for customers, that some make it out to be?
Curiously, the online game code at amazon uk now is, well I never, it’s £49.99! Who would’ve bet on that horse, I wonder.
You’d be the first to complain about prices for Console digital downloads on PSN or XBL – but in the instance of PC gamer, you’re more than happy to go for what is tantamount to a fixed price.
do the credit card owner get refundded?
I got the reference, but reference or not, your point is still in the comment. and its just wrong.
I dont get your point here…
Is it that consumers dont check out other places before buying things on Cd keys and G2A? if so, I agree with you.
And I do every so often check prices on amazon, mostly for older games though.
Ubisoft made a mistake.
so youre willingly giving frauds money but you dont care because its the banks that take the hit when it should be you?
You really /are/ selfish.
I guess there’s two points really –
1) With GMG, they were hit with problematic keys and buying from the chain rather than direct – so it can happen to any company regardless of how ‘legit’ you see them. Which leads me on to that games publishers should be detailing which digital marketplaces they are planning on working with in advance of release, not firing off a list months afterwards (or even a re-release, in this case), and then retrospectively cleaning house to the detriment of players (and I say detriment, because in the vast majority of cases purchasers do not know where/how the cdkey supply market works or the deals between publisher and reseller – yes you can look into how legit a company is (I had done so in the past with cdkeys which seemed okay at the time, I also looked at G2A and found a lot of complaints about them, and as such stayed clear) but it doesn’t mean that you can positively KNOW that a particular reseller is being ‘blessed’ by the publisher.
2) Digital prices (in this case for TESO) all seem to be pretty much fixed at 49.99 or 69.99 (Imperial edition), now remember that this is for a game that is a year old, all they’ve done is drop the subscription model. We talk about sales, but when essentially it looks like ALL digital resellers are selling a download code at MSRP with little to no variance, and yet a code, in a box, from a world wide approved retailer that has to be shipped to you, for EXACTLY the same product is 30% less in price, it starts to have the strange whiff of price fixing.
If the industry wants gamers to go all digital they really need to look at why MSRP is taken at such face value when physical copy retailers are often undercutting the digital price at launch and almost certainly will be after a month. We have situations like we had with Skyrim where Steam still had the game at £39.99 a year after release, but only 6 months after release I got the PC copy for £20 from, again, Amazon.
I bought my TESO key from Kinguin a month ago and I’m still active, so it looks like I just barely missed the fraud.
There is no way to check whether a key is legitimate or not without using the key and then waiting a month or two to see if it gets banned. But that uses the key up and now you have nothing to sell.
I bought it last month and I didn’t get a bad key either.
Nothing wrong with that. The developer is selling them at that price and I’m buying it at that price. All legal.
Bethesda wouldn’t know a key is fraudulent until the bank tries to take the money back.
So of course they would accept the code (by the way, it’s spelled “accepted”).
There’s no real way to stop credit card fraud and these games accept the key immediately with no checking until later the bank wants its money back.
Yes, they are protected from fraud.
It’s the sellers responsibility yet there is no way to check if a key is legitimate or not without using it. So they have a responsibility they can’t fulfill.
GmG has a list of official retail partners.
http://www.greenmangaming.com/publishers/
And the second point mostly holds because the game was expensive, then cheap and then expensive again. Solid copies being cheaper than digital ones doesnt happen often.
legal but immoral. If you think this is right you dont deserve to play these games.
Good thing you aren’t in charge of anything.
Aww crap I hope I didn’t lose my account, got the play any race dlc from G2A.
“Who thought they’d bought genuine keys”
Gullible 9 year olds are gullible… isnt it obvious its not legitimate if the price is too good to be true and all you recieve is a CD Key? G2A and G2play among other sites are even Censored on steam discussions.
No it isn’t obvious. When you search google for “elder scrolls online sale” the first click is cdkeys and the 3rd is allkeyshop.
good for you?
look out guys, we have the one, who’s going to stop all second sellers websites , and while we’re at it why not pirated games as well 😉
I bought mine from G2A. Maybe I got lucky?
hmm? no I fully support pirating. Only because some companies still annoy everyone with annoying pirate countermeasures that stop every non pirate form playing the game, or some companies overcharge for their games, or some companies deliver bad games and therefore will get what is coming to them (I will never buy a single other game from rocksteady for example, after having spent 30£ on the season pass and base game of Arkham Knight)
you ever look back at the things you said in anger and get embarrassed? cause i dont think that guy was a troll, if he was a troll he would be cussing you out and telling you to kill yourself for being a retard
I was affected as well :(… The price wasn’t too good either, I saved like 10% from regular price. 🙁
then why keep commenting to me, if you already just said your all up for pirating, when at least i give money.