Kinda sucks for me, as I’ve almost exclusively used gift cards for the last few years. I get a bonus tax-free credit card by my employer, which I can only use at retail stores. So those were a great way for me to use that card to buy games. It was also a good option for people who wanted to avoid payment providers like Visa/Mastercard etc. Oh well.
G2A is a good example of a marketplace where steam games and keys are for sale that were purchased with stolen credit cards (through gift cards to launder accordingly).
It is a shitty situation, but as a former IT worker, this is a massive legal liability and the costs of protecting customers are likely to only grow, not level or shrink.
Also, steam accounts are quite easy to get ahold of that are off Valve’s radar. I’m not personally inclined, but there are things like CS and TF2 trading bot accounts that could be used as vectors to launder items (and like I said earlier, steam keys/games can be sold via gray market websites like G2A).
There is nuance here, and I’d imagine the staff members behind the scenes have more than enough data to make an educated decision (if they didn’t give a shit they would leave the cards on the shelves because they clearly make money).
Yes, there’s plenty of evidence that games and items purchased with stolen credit cards / gift cards exist. This is just a lazy response from Steam.
I’ve personally seen scammer accounts that impersonate users and send fraudulent friend requests and then engage in social engineering to blatantly try to steal Steam accounts go unpunished even after 6 months… While friends in Discord share post after post of the scammers on multiple accounts are identified, reported to Steam through their official channels, and then nothing is heard of again.
They’re lax as fuck.
Instead of back and forth arguing with anecdotes about scam mitigation and fraud loss, I will just say that sometimes the laziest approach is also a valuable one.
For example, when steam was required to build out of returns apparatus for one country, they made it available in all countries all at once and became very consistent with their policies, generous even with those policies, about giving returns to unhappy customers about a game they purchased. Hell, about a game that I purchased. I personally have played a game for 2 hours, and then message saying that I didn’t love the game, and got my 20 bucks back to play towards other games. Toys R Us wouldn’t do that in 2006. Best Buy wouldn’t do that in 2012. GameStop would laugh maniacally, spittle flying off of their dancing jowls, before accepting a trade in for a $1.29.
Seen as one of maybe five companies I would trust and give the benefit of the doubt to, when it comes to handling my money and consistently doing right by me as a consumer. I’m sorry that you haven’t had the same experience.
As others have stated, I think Steam making this love nullifies a lot of the bite of the New York lawsuit against them, and while it may starve them of some percent of revenue, and ice out enclaves of customers, it honestly could be a net good for consumers to stave off an entire category of fraud.