Valve Fights Money Laundering in Counter Strike

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Valve has been putting renewed efforts into cleaning up Counter Strike recently. Just a couple of days ago Tsing reported on their AI banning players for toxic language. Now they are going after users who have figured out a way to launder money using the game’s loot boxes. Who knew this was a thing?

Well, where there’s a will, there’s a way and it seems some unscrupulous people had found one with this. Glad to see Valve putting effort in bringing their game back to gamer’s. Thanks to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, for reporting on this.

Evidently buying and reselling the loot boxes on the market place had enabled users to launder money. Valve has initiated an update to address the issue. From the CS:GO blog on October 28th, 2019,

“Starting today, CS:GO container keys purchased in-game can no longer leave the purchasing account. That is, they cannot be sold on the Steam Community Market or traded. Pre-existing CS:GO container keys are unaffected–those keys can still be sold on the Steam Community Market and traded.

Why make this change? In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers. However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.“

 

[_k_]

How they did not see this happening after the tf2 key money laundering I will never know.

 

[Azrak]

Did they keep a cut of each transaction? If they did, there is your answer. Skim a little bit for a while until the heat is too much.

 

[_k_]

Valve gets a cut on all marketplace sales. With tf2 you would farm items to make metal, trade it for keys, and then sell the keys on the market.