Indie dev mounts profitable sting operation towards scammy Steam curators

Artist's conception of indie developer Fabrice Breton knocking out some scammy curators.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of indie developer Fabrice Breton knocking out some scammy curators. (credit score: Steam)

Valve has eliminated a handful of Steam curator pages after a digital sting operation uncovered them as a part of an obvious rip-off to accumulate and resell free recreation keys.

In a Twitter thread posted earlier this week, Brok the Investigator developer Fabrice Breton mentioned the flood of free recreation key requests he acquired from Steam curators after his recreation’s current launch. Whereas a few of these curator pages had been little doubt reputable, Breton suspected many extra had been scammers utilizing artificially inflated curator pages to get free recreation keys. These free keys might then be transformed into chilly laborious money via gray-market code resellers like G2A, thus consuming into reputable gross sales that present revenue to the developer.

To separate the rip-off curators from the true ones, Breton mentioned he responded to these key requests with keys for the free, restricted Prologue model of the sport moderately than the total launch. Whereas these keys could be indistinguishable from full ones earlier than redemption, any curators really involved in enjoying the sport would rapidly notice the distinction and attain out about the issue.

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