#IS THERE A STEAM TRADE SCAM HOW TO#

It would be easier for them to go after the users who don't understand how to stay secure online, but the prevalence of items make it worthwhile to target everyone. What used to be a handful of hackers is now a highly effective, organized network, in the business of stealing and selling items. We used to hold the opinion that if you were smart about account security, you'd be protected-it's easy to assume that users whose accounts were stolen were new or technically naïve users who must be sharing their passwords or clicking on suspicious links. And that makes it easy to forget its significance compromised security of email accounts and PCs, Steam account violation, and theft. The 'I got hacked' story is told so frequently it's become commonplace. Essentially all Steam accounts are now targets. Second, practically every active Steam account is now involved in the economy, via items or trading cards, with enough value to be worth a hacker's time. In revisiting our strategy to stop it, we found two things of note.įirst, enough money now moves around the system that stealing virtual Steam goods has become a real business for skilled hackers. This was an unacceptable status quo and we needed to address it. The number of hijacked accounts continues to grow This might be fairly minor for common items, but for rare items this had the potential to significantly increase the number in existence. Duplicating the stolen items devalues all the other equivalent items in the economy. We were fully aware of the tradeoff here. We decided to err on the side of protecting them: we left the stolen goods, and we created duplicates on the original compromised account to replace them. Looking at their account activity, it wasn't too hard to figure out what happened, but undoing it was harder because we don't want to take things away from innocent users.

They'd then be traded again and again, eventually being sold to an innocent user. Once an account was compromised, the items would be quickly cleaned out. Having your account stolen, and your items traded away, is a terrible experience, and we hated that it was becoming more common for our customers. We thought we'd walk through how we decided to implement them, in the hopes that it helps you understand why they're absolutely necessary.Īccount theft has been around since Steam began, but with the introduction of Steam Trading, the problem has increased twenty-fold as the number one complaint from our users. Recently we've seen the community have a good discussion about the pros and cons of trade holds.

Is there a steam trade scam