How to avoid CS2 Scammers?

With CS2 skins becoming more and more expensive and popular, it was only a matter of time before scammers started settings their sights on your skins. Avoiding them is a must if you want to go deeper into the Steam Trading world. So, how do you do that?

General Safety Tips

You probably already know this, but just in case you don’t, remember to: Use Two-Factor Authentication on all your accounts, including your email, Steam and social media. Never use the same password twice. To make sure you don’t forget the passwords, you can use a password manager. Never share your password with anyone. Companies on the internet do not ask you for your password except for their login site. Don’t click suspicious links. Always remember to check whether the address doesn’t have any typos (e.g. “steamcommunity.com”). If you click it and give your login details, you will give up giving scammers access to your login data and your 2FA.

These should protect you from the simplest CS2 scams. However, there are some scams that are much more nuanced and harder to avoid than others. For example…

The Steam API scam

Some scammers lay dormant for a long while. Say somebody gained access to your account a long time ago. They didn’t find anything worthwhile, so they just left. You changed your password and you think everything’s alright.

Well, it isn’t.

The scammers were sure to save your Steam API key. This allows scammers to see incoming trade offers. Say you’re selling a skin on a website, you would receive an offer with nothing in exchange. The scammer’s software would then quickly cancel the offer and send a new one from one of their bots masquerading as a bot from the website you’re using. You’d accept the offer, and bang, your skin is gone!

To avoid this, be sure to check whether anyone has access to your Steam Web API Key regularly, here. If you don’t have one registered, you’re fine. If you do have one registered, be sure to revoke it by clicking the “Revoke My Steam Web API Key” button.

Once you do that, you should be safe from this dangerous scam. There’s one more to look out for, though.

The Middle-Man Scam

If you have a valuable skin, like an expensive knife, odds are that finding somebody to pay a good price for it is difficult. Scammers use this fact, offering a wicked price for your item in exchange for a PayPal transfer. To “secure” the transaction, they offer the services of a trusted middleman, who is actually an accomplice.

Do not send skins to anyone you do not personally know. Use trusted third-party websites if you need to do any swaps that are not direct skin-for-skin trades.

The internet is crawling with ne’er-do-wells, so be careful and remember about basic safety tips to avoid losing your CS2 inventory

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