Steam takes measures to stop scammers from selling fake items

Valve is taking measures to stop a scam that’s causing trouble on its digital storefront, Steam.

The scam involved developers releasing games with fake items. Worse, those items masqueraded as rare items from games like Team Fortress 2 and DoTA 2.

Those rare items often sell for hundreds of dollars in Steam’s online market. Players are able to trade items in the market, making it a veritable online economy for digital cosmetics and items. Developers with fake items were abusing the system to sell fake rare items to people.

However, Valve moved quickly to shut down the nascent activity. The company started by removing two games from the store. Now, Valve will notify users if an item being purchased is suspicious.

When a user tries to trade for an item from a game they’ve never played, Steam notifies them. Furthermore, Steam will notify users if the item is from a really new game. Notifications come in the form of a number of warning pop-ups.

While it doesn’t seem like much, it’s a quick and temporary fix. Valve has more coming as well.

Tony Paloma, a Valve developer with the username ‘Drunken F00l,’ elaborated on what security features are coming to combat the issue.

“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,” Paloma wrote in a recent Reddit post. “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.”

Paloma also indicated the company intends to restore or recover items for users scammed prior to the warning system coming online.

Ultimately, users should be able to shop in relative safety now — at least until the next scam comes along.

Source: Steamed