Scam profiles on Steam

[[Rx.] Christian Troy]

I know there have been scam profiles on Steam for years but, is it just me or has there been a huge spike in these profiles showing up on Steam?

What I'm talking about are these profiles that send you a friend request, you accept it, they start out with a very small general conversation, then go right to the sob story of some how not being able to buy something. Then of course they say they will give you the cash/credit/coin/etc and you will get some kind of a reward for helping them get what they want.

I always end up blocking these profiles as soon as they give me the "I need help" routine. Which really gets annoying because meeting cool people in game is a good way to find cool people to play with. To make things worse, these scam profiles wouldn't be showing up if they weren't working.

 

[savvaisnotagirlolbbq]

I used to have a lot of that 2 years ago where it was just a bunch of newly made private profiles that kept adding me. I added one and it immediately spammed trade requests. Now I don't have that problem anymore, I don't know why, maybe its because of my really long profile name.

 

[MTD]

The same thing is happening to me too, I used to never get friend requests from these accounts, but all of a sudden this month I have gotten a bunch.

 

[EArkham]

I don't accept any adds at all, ever. I don't even give them a chance to start talking. It's sad, cause it's fun to talk to new people sometimes, but 99% of the time, it's just some jackass bot.

Ironically, I used to get TONS of these obvious bot adds as well as traders, but I think I've only had about a couple this past month + 1 random trader, which is way lower than normal. Maybe cause I haven't turned on steam chat in ages so it looks like I'm "inactive" or something.

Ok, well, I guess I do accept adds if it's obvious it's someone from tf2maps that messaged me here first or we have two dozen friends in common. But otherwise, hard no.

 

[Twist.vmf]

i like to just say stupid stuff to bots and have fun

 

[[Rx.] Christian Troy]

i like to just say stupid stuff to bots and have fun

I used to like doing that to bots when Yahoo messenger was still an active thing.

One thing I did notice about all of this, it seems to depend on what games you play on Steam. If I play TF2 I will hardly get invites from any of these types of profiles. If I play CS:GO I can get 2 to 5 invites in a few hours time from these profiles.

 

[Werewolf]

I think I avoid most of these because a) I always search the players SteamID in google before adding them, and b) Enhanced Steam will flag players with SteamRep bans. Between the two, I can spot most scams coming before they can message me.

 

[AsG_Alligator]

I just refuse friend invites from random people altogether.

If you want to trade with me, send a trade offer.

If you want to talk about something write a comment on my profile with details on what you want to discuss.

If you just add me randomly you can fuck off.

Thats my 3-point policy.