Valve No Longer Replacing Steam Items Lost To Trade Scams

[Conrad Zimmerman]

Valve No Longer Replacing Steam Items Lost To Trade Scams

Restitution measure removed to protect market sanctity.

In the past, when bilked out of valuable items by a nefarious scammer through Steam trading, users could make an appeal to have their lost property restored. This is no longer an option, based on an update to the service's "Scams FAQ" page.

According to an entry in the FAQ, Valve has decided not to restore lost items (which, being wholly digital, could simply be generated again) because of the impact on the market value of items within the community. "Our community assigns an item a value that is at least partially determined by that item's scarcity," the entry reads. "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."

The entry goes on to indicate that Valve feels it has met its responsibility to provide enough information for users to be able to protect themselves: "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."

Indeed, Valve does provide a wealth of information regarding scams perpetrated using their platform. The Scams FAQ describes fifteen different scams, red flags users should look out for, and a variety of other tips for responsible trading.

Sources: Eurogamer [https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?s=e41b6e120e14804b4a708a2ad935b188&ref=3415-WAFH-6433]

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[senkus]

Well, that's a disaster for anyone who wants to trade for games, isn't it?
Steam game gifts are revoked when it is discovered that the original buyer was a fraudster.
If your gift got revoked, it used to be that you'd get back the items you traded for it.
If I read this correctly, now you just lose everything.

 

[vallorn]

Two steps forwards, One step back eh Valve?

So if someone steals my items that's it? I lose all the stuff I've worked for? What if I'm a TF2 player with Australium weapons and Unusual hats and taunts? And I know these items get IDs attached to them, Valve can delete them and remove them from the market so their answer is baloney.

 

[Kanova]

Two steps forwards, One step back eh Valve?

So if someone steals my items that's it? I lose all the stuff I've worked for? What if I'm a TF2 player with Australium weapons and Unusual hats and taunts? And I know these items get IDs attached to them, Valve can delete them and remove them from the market so their answer is baloney.

How would they "steal" them? That isn't really something they can do is it? Unless its like a TF2 thing, I don't know. If you get scammed, then it isn't Valves fault.

 

[vallorn]

Two steps forwards, One step back eh Valve?

So if someone steals my items that's it? I lose all the stuff I've worked for? What if I'm a TF2 player with Australium weapons and Unusual hats and taunts? And I know these items get IDs attached to them, Valve can delete them and remove them from the market so their answer is baloney.

How would they "steal" them? That isn't really something they can do is it? Unless its like a TF2 thing, I don't know. If you get scammed, then it isn't Valves fault.

Phishing access to someone's steam account and then trading all the items out of it. I've seen it happen and it's come up a few times in the TF2 market.

 

[Areloch]

Two steps forwards, One step back eh Valve?

So if someone steals my items that's it? I lose all the stuff I've worked for? What if I'm a TF2 player with Australium weapons and Unusual hats and taunts? And I know these items get IDs attached to them, Valve can delete them and remove them from the market so their answer is baloney.

How would they "steal" them? That isn't really something they can do is it? Unless its like a TF2 thing, I don't know. If you get scammed, then it isn't Valves fault.

Phishing access to someone's steam account and then trading all the items out of it. I've seen it happen and it's come up a few times in the TF2 market.

This refers to trading scams. Unwarranted access to an account would be a different issue (fraud). This looks like it's specifically for "If someone convinced you to do a trade deal and then screwed you over by having the deal not be fair, etc".

 

[Baresark]

Well, that's a disaster for anyone who wants to trade for games, isn't it?
Steam game gifts are revoked when it is discovered that the original buyer was a fraudster.
If your gift got revoked, it used to be that you'd get back the items you traded it for.
If I read this correctly, now you just lose everything.

Are you sure? I read this that once the item changes hand, that is it. Meaning the scammer still has the item after and you don't get your trade. It wouldn't make sense to both not give it back to you and remove it from the scammer. The reasoning should hold both ways, but I could easily be wrong on this. That would be a stupid decision Valve would make.

OT: There is a lot of people out there who scam. But there are also all kinds of things in place to help prevent it. I mean, at what point does personal responsibility come into play. Personally, I have always found Steam trading to be a bigger headache than it's worth in regards to this. I had plenty of people friend request me just for items in my inventory. It started to get annoying so the last person who did it I just gave them all my shit that I could. One thing I found very helpful is Steam levels. They basically give out the first few Steam levels, so when someone friend requests me and has a Steam level of 0, I ignore them. It would be different if I played a lot of TF2 or something and had a shit ton of hats, but I don't really care about digital only items in which I do not have any interaction with.

 

[Doom972]

These digital items cost nothing to reproduce. I'm a fan of Valve, but I have to say that they are being dicks about it. If they're so worried about item values dropping, they can track the account the item was transferred to and transfer it back. I doubt that these items don't have unique ID numbers and I doubt Valve don't keep logs of transaction done in the trading system.

 

[vallorn]

Two steps forwards, One step back eh Valve?

So if someone steals my items that's it? I lose all the stuff I've worked for? What if I'm a TF2 player with Australium weapons and Unusual hats and taunts? And I know these items get IDs attached to them, Valve can delete them and remove them from the market so their answer is baloney.

How would they "steal" them? That isn't really something they can do is it? Unless its like a TF2 thing, I don't know. If you get scammed, then it isn't Valves fault.

Phishing access to someone's steam account and then trading all the items out of it. I've seen it happen and it's come up a few times in the TF2 market.

This refers to trading scams. Unwarranted access to an account would be a different issue (fraud). This looks like it's specifically for "If someone convinced you to do a trade deal and then screwed you over by having the deal not be fair, etc".

Ahhhh okay, I guess I misread it then. My bad.

 

[Dectomax]

These digital items cost nothing to reproduce. I'm a fan of Valve, but I have to say that they are being dicks about it. If they're so worried about item values dropping, they can track the account the item was transferred to and transfer it back. I doubt that these items don't have unique ID numbers and I doubt Valve don't keep logs of transaction done in the trading system.

Atleast for CS:GO, these items do have unique ID numbers and unique USER ID numbers. So tracking the trade history and the status of an item is fairly easy. It's how a lot of the CS trading community avoids duplicated items ( That's the main reason for this - people would VPN into their accounts and act like they were scammed to dupe an item of value ).

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

I understand their logic, but it still raises questions. So when an item gets scammed... they don't delete the item from the person who scammed? I mean, I get that they don't want to just create a new copy of the item since that means that Person A getting scammed causes everyone else with the item to lose money, but why not just take the item that was lost and move it from the scammer back to the scamee? Here's another question: Are they still going to punish scammers? Are they going to get more harsh on scammers? "We aren't going to dupe items anymore" almost sounds like it would be a scammer's holiday if there isn't some measure to step-up enforcement.

 

[Zontar]

Honestly, at this point the only way to get scammed is through stupidity. It's not like the old days where all a trade needed was for both parties to press 'trade' and whatever was there is swapped, you need both to confirm it for the option to trade to come up (if either party changes a single thing in the trade, their confirmation is deactivated), and once that happens you then need to go to your email and confirm the trade.

Stupidity is now the only reason for scams to happen now, and you can't cure that.

 

[Deathfish15]

These digital items cost nothing to reproduce. I'm a fan of Valve, but I have to say that they are being dicks about it. If they're so worried about item values dropping, they can track the account the item was transferred to and transfer it back. I doubt that these items don't have unique ID numbers and I doubt Valve don't keep logs of transaction done in the trading system.

So what you're saying is that Valve should hire extra babysi....I mean, employees to do the extra work of tracking down every item that gets a scam flag?


As someone above mentioned: "When does PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY come into play?" Valve is a business and shouldn't need to expense an army of customer service reps to day-and-night babysit the trading community. Especially when they already provide tons of information about avoiding scams and so on.

 

[zumbledum]

given the nature of the things being affected i have w feeling its scammers selling there tf2 hats then claiming they were scammed to get free ones back , valve can either challenge it or simply drop the service.

 

[Charli]

given the nature of the things being affected i have w feeling its scammers selling there tf2 hats then claiming they were scammed to get free ones back , valve can either challenge it or simply drop the service.

This, it's a case of 'this is why we can't have nice things' i'd imagine. Someone's been abusing the system.

Happens frequently in online games so why not on valves virtual store/psuedo game thing.

 

[Doom972]

These digital items cost nothing to reproduce. I'm a fan of Valve, but I have to say that they are being dicks about it. If they're so worried about item values dropping, they can track the account the item was transferred to and transfer it back. I doubt that these items don't have unique ID numbers and I doubt Valve don't keep logs of transaction done in the trading system.

So what you're saying is that Valve should hire extra babysi....I mean, employees to do the extra work of tracking down every item that gets a scam flag?


As someone above mentioned: "When does PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY come into play?" Valve is a business and shouldn't need to expense an army of customer service reps to day-and-night babysit the trading community. Especially when they already provide tons of information about avoiding scams and so on.

Actually, no. What I said was that they shouldn't have changed the policy that was already in place, in which they gave scammed users their items back. Did they fire a bunch of people when they changed the policy? No. So there is no need to hire any additional "babysitters", as you call them.

This change will cause people to stop using the system and reduce the cash flow Valve gets for these digital items. So when does personal accountability come into place? When Valve says: I'm tired of making money selling digital items that cost nothing to reproduce.

 

[weirdee]

I understand their logic, but it still raises questions. So when an item gets scammed... they don't delete the item from the person who scammed? I mean, I get that they don't want to just create a new copy of the item since that means that Person A getting scammed causes everyone else with the item to lose money, but why not just take the item that was lost and move it from the scammer back to the scamee? Here's another question: Are they still going to punish scammers? Are they going to get more harsh on scammers? "We aren't going to dupe items anymore" almost sounds like it would be a scammer's holiday if there isn't some measure to step-up enforcement.

the main issue with removing the other item is that by then it might have been traded to more people who didn't know the item was scammed, and they would all have to either reverse every single transaction (which then gets too complex when interacting with other transactions that crossed that path and then you have a shattered timeline) or duplicate the item

imagine, if you will, that you worked super hard to trade up for an item, and then get it from your friend in a fair trade, but then it turns out that the item was scammed, both you and your friend weren't actually involved because you were far down the line of trading, but your item still gets deleted anyway

is that fair to you

 

[StorkV]

How the hell do people get scamed on steam trade!

 

[Yozozo]

I understand their logic, but it still raises questions. So when an item gets scammed... they don't delete the item from the person who scammed? I mean, I get that they don't want to just create a new copy of the item since that means that Person A getting scammed causes everyone else with the item to lose money, but why not just take the item that was lost and move it from the scammer back to the scamee? Here's another question: Are they still going to punish scammers? Are they going to get more harsh on scammers? "We aren't going to dupe items anymore" almost sounds like it would be a scammer's holiday if there isn't some measure to step-up enforcement.

the main issue with removing the other item is that by then it might have been traded to more people who didn't know the item was scammed, and they would all have to either reverse every single transaction (which then gets too complex when interacting with other transactions that crossed that path and then you have a shattered timeline) or duplicate the item

imagine, if you will, that you worked super hard to trade up for an item, and then get it from your friend in a fair trade, but then it turns out that the item was scammed, both you and your friend weren't actually involved because you were far down the line of trading, but your item still gets deleted anyway

is that fair to you

In the event of stolen goods, in the real world, the item gets returned to the original owner and you get zero, zilch, and nada. You take it up with the merchant who sold it to you who will usually give you a refund, and they work up to their retailer in the same manner till it goes back to the original thief.

 

[Grabehn]

How the hell do people get scamed on steam trade!

Stupidity is VERY underrated.

Just the other day a guy made a post about how he was banned for trying to trade in-game items for Steam games, and that nowhere was it stated that you couldn't do that.