Trade Scamming

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The world will thank me for this, you monster! Click to listen — The Spy reporting a scammer to Valve

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A trade scam is when a user convinces another user to make a deal under false pretenses. Scams usually involve deception in order to convince a user that they are getting a good or fair deal when in fact they are not or cheating a user out of their items for (usually) nothing.

There are many different ways of being scammed, some will just trick you out of a few items while others could hijack your Steam account. The methods we know will be listed down below:

Quickswitching

This method is extremely ineffective now with the trade hold and additional verification. essentially once both parties have agreed upon a fair trade and they are happy the scam party quickly switches out their promised item for one of less value and readies up before the other user can react/notice. However this is much harder to pull off because extra verification is needed before the trade can be completed and gives the user who is being tricked an extra chance to notice.

Fake Bots

A screenshot of a fake Opskins bot scam

Fake Bots are users/alts/bots that send you offers for a users items for nothing, normally to 'deposit' them into the site, which after being deposited, cannot be withdrawn. The Scam usually goes like this:

• A user adds you to their friend list
• they lead you to a well known trading site (e.g Opskins, Marketplace.tf ect) (or they can lead you to a fake trading site made just for scamming)
• they get you to list your item but not deposit it
• a fake bot sends you an offer for your item for nothing in return
• the scammer try's to convince the user to accept the trade
• once the user accepts, the scammer blocks the user and the deposited items cannot be withdrawn

Fake Middleman

The Fake Middleman Scam is pretty self explaninatory, people use middle men to be a mediator when trading highly valuable items to make sure the items go to the right people and prevents most types of scamming. However middle men can be fakes that take the valuable items without giving it to the respective users. Alot of the time the fake middle man will be working with/be an alt of a scammer to take your items. It will usually go down like this:

• You have a valuable item that you wish to trade.
• You meet with someone who is willing to trade and they insist on getting a middleman.
• The middleman and the person you are trading with are friends or the middle man is an alt of the scammer.
• The middleman takes all the items and gives it to the scammer.

or it can go down like this:

• You are trading valuable items and you want to get a middleman involved.
• The other user agrees and you trade your items to the middleman.
• The middleman takes the items and leaves.
• The middleman will most likely block you.

Phishing Links

Phishing Links are links to websites usually impersonating Steam and make you sign in so they can take your account details and hijack your account. Here's how it usually goes down:

• A bot/user will message you asking you to add a friend of theirs and they will send a phishing link that looks very similar to the actual steam website.
• There it will ask you to sign in and once you do your account will be hijacked.

Another method:

• A users Steam profile will be private and they will send you a phishing link to "their Steam inventory"
• You will have to sign in and from there they will hijack your account.