Being scammed on Steam is something most folks do not know is possible. But worry not, Valve knows, and the company is taking steps to counter scams with a new system.
Steam will be introducing a new trade feature that will keep your items protected whenever you accept a trade starting Dec. 9.
According to a report from the Counter-Strike blog, the digital distribution platform will be bringing forth a feature called Trade Holds. Basically, this feature should make it difficult for scammers to steal games from another user's account.
For those who are not aware, scammers are capable of tricking some Steam users to give up access to their account. If the account contains valuable video games among other items, the scammer will then proceed to trade all contents to a dummy account. When this is done, everything will belong to the scammer, and the innocent user is left in a state of confusion and anger.
With this new Trade Holds feature, Valve will hold all trades for up to three days. During this time, items that were traded will not be fully removed from a person's account until the days have passed. This should give Steam users enough time to realize what is going on before a scammer walks away with a bag of gold.
The report went on to state that honest traders can get around the three-day hold. For this to happen, both traders must use the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator, and are required to have been using it for at least seven days.
Now here's the thing, trades that have been cancelled during the three-day hold will be placed in a cooldown state for a certain amount of time to prevent unauthorized attempts to steal content.
What Steam is doing will not completely derail scammers, but it should slow things down along with giving users a better fighting chance to save their stuff. We hope Valve is able to one day come up with a system that puts an end to scammers once and for all, but for now, this will do.
