While Steam’s marketplace is a great place to trade or sell in-game items, some of which can be extremely valuable, it has created problems in the past, such as gambling due to the valuable nature of these items. More recently it has also created another problem: scams, in which some developers were releasing games containing counterfeit items.These items were created to masquerade as Team Fortress 2 and DotA 2 rares that could sell for hundreds, which explains the lure behind them. However the good news is that Valve has caught on to these scams and have since removed the offending games, and are now putting into place scam protections that will help prevent these scams from even happening in the first place.
In a post on the Steam subreddit, Valve developer Tony Paloma said, “We also started requiring approval for app name changes, and have more planned to address this sort of problem that we couldn’t get done in one day. We are hopeful that having to dismiss two warning dialogs will be sufficient to make people think twice about trades containing forged items, but this is not the end of our response, and we’ll continue to monitor, of course.”
There is also good news for those who have been scammed, where those who fell victim to these scams prior to the warning system will get the item they traded for the scam item back.
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