You sent him giftable items and got dark souls giftable in exactly the same trade window? In that case, I was sure you'd get a cancelled trade and get your items back.
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I'm going to assume he gave the game through steam and got a CD key that the payment got revoked on.
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Yes, but you don't know where the person who traded it to you got it from.
What probably happened is that guy got it from someone else who bought it using a stolen credit card (or whatever other payment that became invalid.) Either knowingly or otherwise the person traded it to you. At some point in the future Valve became aware that payment was pulled for that purchase, and since the person who activated it is known (you) that person's copy of the game was forfeit.
Valve might be able to put better protections in place (a "this game was purchased on XX/YY/ZZZZ, in A/B/C region", perhaps) but otherwise it's largely out of their hands. This is the risk you make when you receive trades from other folks.
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This is completely Valve's fault, if what OP said was true, he should get his games back. How the hell do people know that the gift they trade was fraud or not?
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It wasn't fraudulent at the time of the trade. Who said Valve is the one who issued the game? Maybe it was a game code straight from the developer who then got defrauded by the purchaser? What if it wasn't even fraud, what if it was a legitimate purchase that someone charged back?
So long as you don't trade games/items you have nothing to worry about. Allowing you to perform trades doesn't suddenly place the burden to ensure the item(s) you're trading for will always be valid on the shoulders of Valve. This is no different than a pawn shop purchasing a ring, then having the police take it as evidence the next day with no compensation for the pawn shop.
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I don't really understand what you are trying to say. OP clearly stated it was Steam tradeable gift, he even posted a screenshot. So there is no game code on the trade.
According to Steam trading policy, every games traded on steam window trade is safe, and if something happen(for example chargeback, fraud gift, etc), the other trader will get their games back.
So long as you don't trade games/items you have nothing to worry about.
I hope you aren't serious about this, trading feature is there for a reason.
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Interesting, I wasn't aware the policy reflected the receipt of games that ultimately were fraudulent transactions.
I'm also surprised it took 8 months to uncover the fraud... seems weird to me that a company would've looked that far back through transactions to detect fraud, and I'm pretty sure most credit card companies won't allow chargebacks that far from the date of purchase. I suppose stranger things have happened...
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I doubt the chargeback happened after 8 months because OP said that the trade happened 8 months ago. But in my country, we have up to 3 months to complain.
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tell them to give you fortix, that should compensate for everything
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No, you have to win Fortix on SG, or it does not count.
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well it wasn´t one of these "to-good-to-be-true-deals".
at the time when the trade happened dark souls was still preorder and it also was still region free (they came up with the regionlock just 1 or 2 days later). so it was pretty cheap from RU (~15 euro).
In return i gave 2x streetfighter which were 7,50€ each (i wanted to buy it anyway so i just got the 4pack) plus the alan wake collection (can´t remember where i got this from, but i guess i didn´t give a lot for it).
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And since your avatar is Ada , that me me even more sure that THE MARTIAN using Television wave to control our mind
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I see you have a picture of your trade history now (that was not there at the time I originally replied). That, along with the message from Valve about Dark Souls being revoked should be enough for Steam Rep, and for that matter should be convincing to Steam Support. I am not sure why they are treating this case so unusually, and you have my condolences.
That all said, I am not sure how what I said before was "wrong"; it was logical. Your statement that you lacked proof to get the person marked as a scammer on Steam Rep led me to believe that there was more to this than one trade transaction.
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well if i would be a steamrep.com guy i woudn´t accept the proofs because:
->1 the pic about the trade is ok so far, but there is no proof about what happened to dark souls after that (did i redeem it? did i trade it?)
->2 the message i got from steam support only says that 1 of the games i got through trading was fraudulent, dark souls was never mentioned by steam, - i had to figure that out myself comparing my trade history with my gameslist and inventory
->3 the conversation with steam support about the revoke and and giving me my stuff back is completly in german and therefore not accepted as proof on steamrep.com
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If the deal was entirely within a single trade window (your tradable Street Fighters for his tradable Dark Souls) and the game you trraded for was revoked due to a payment issue, Steam support should return the games you traded for it to your inventory. I don't have the link handy at the moment, but that is stated pretty clearly in the Steam trading policy.
On the other hand, if any part of the trade happened outside the window (e.g. one of the games was a key, or an untradable gift, etc) you're probably screwed. Really odd to see it revoked after so long in any case, though. Good luck!
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In that case, contact support and make sure to quote the Steam Trading Policy that states: "What if I redeemed a game from a trade that is fraudulently purchased?
If this happens, the account where the fraud took place will be suspended. Your account will not be suspended, however the game you redeemed/unpacked to your account will be removed. We will restore the items/gifts that were associated with the trade that you performed to receive the game. If you did not trade any items/gifts for the game directly then we are not able to restore anything to your account (i.e. if the game was a gift). Please contact Steam Support if a game that you traded for is missing from your inventory or account."
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do what Lunk here is saying and just keep your cool and be very patient.
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i am cool and patient :)
it´s not about the money i may have lost, it´s about the feeling that valve isn´t doing shit about it even if they already figured out that i got scammed and checked it already. i feel punked as a customer, that´s it.
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Both were inventory items, traded within a trade window? No keys, nothing outside the trade window? Because if so, do what Lunk said anyway. It's worth it man. That sucks.
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Yup, both over trade window. All went to void.
I did try asking them to refund game, they said they won't but I didn't say about that Policy.
Do you think it's kinda too late (to copy paste what Lunk said) now when I have already contacted them once like 1-2 months before?
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Why would it be too late? Make a new ticket, refer to the old ticket, and tell them you had someone on the net tell you about their own policy, copy paste it back to them, done.
Just curious - how did you get those 2 games yourself? And again - they weren't keys, were they?
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I have had 3 games revoked over my trading history. One was from my library, and Valve sent a message saying it was revoked. I also had a few games vanish from inventory in the middle of last year but at that time Valve didn't send a notice at all. They were just gone. I had been about 1 month past having a 10 page inventory (where I likely would have never noticed something missing), but as I was down to 15 inventory games I luckily did notice. I opened a ticket and after dealing with their ridiculous bot answers and quoting the aforementioned Trading Policy for a few weeks, they game my the games/items I had originally traded.
Steam Support seems to operate on the idea that if they drag it out, you will give up. You will then be short a game and then more likely to buy it in the future. It is shady, and ridiculous that they need to be quoted their own policies to get them to make things right. Glad things worked out for you. But I am still bummed that their customer support and outreach is so purposefully slow and not helpful. They could learn a lot about customer support from not only other game client support systems, but just about any business.
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If this were true then go to your trade history and show proof to steamrep that it was a game for game. Not like much will be done about it, but if it was there in record in a single trade then yeah, Valve would have gave the games back or allowed you to keep your games. However I doubt they were done in the same trade window.
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Send that to support I suggest then and Steamrep. If they deny it just demand to talk to a different person from support or their supervisor.. even though Valve has none. Alternatively leave a message on http://steamcommunity.com/id/afarnsworth/ he usually takes notice on stuff that's posted on his page.
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I'd love to see this issue resolved for you - also curious to see how this pans out. Keep us posted!
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That is a bunch of extreme balls, man :/
Tried what Lunk said yet?
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Fuck it go for gold man, it's worth it, fucking Steam support douches.
Anyway, so, they revoked your Dead Island because it was bad, ok, but then didn't bother returning the games you had traded off for it?!? Fucking dickbags, that goes against their own policy, as Lunk copypasta shows. Open a new ticket, describe the entire situation to them (include time and date of the trade from your trade history to save them effort - seems they're lazy enough as it is), and copypasta their own words back to them. What unbelievable cretins.
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The awesome part is when the inevitable class action lawsuit happens (new TOS or not), we will all get about $2 once the lawyers are paid off. lol
My guess is discovery would reveal a lot of purposeful and organized deception by Steam via their support system. If they didn't just employ bots, I would say a whistleblower would likely step forward before too long :)
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Your trade history and the messages from Steam Support would be enough to prove what happened and get him marked.
Similar thing happened to me, traded Dead Space Pack for TF2 items. Turns out the account was hacked and once the originally owner regained control they contacted support and got all their items back and got to keep Dead Space Pack. Even worse was that Steam support gave me a trade ban despite the fact I was the one who had nothing by the end of it.
I contacted them, they removed the trade ban, but I never did get Dead Space Pack or the TF2 items back.
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Reading something like this has me wondering if I'm doing right by encouraging people to get into trading, when the gatekeepers themselves can't even get it right. :(
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Hi,
It happened to me before but what I traded was game items. They have a Policy that states that if something like that was to happen they should return the items to you, but if those items were not 'Valve' game items or games I guess they won't cover it.
Here's the Policy on their site..
Steam Trading Policy
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->1 there were no ingame items like tf2 or dota involved, just the games you can see on the pic
->2 i´ve read the policy already, and did everything statet there to get my stuff back, valve just refuses that service without any reason.
anyway, thx for the advice tho
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Dark Souls is a GFWL game. Did you copy the cd-key? You could use it to play online without steam, that's actually how I play double DRM games.
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The exact same thing happed to me before, but Steam restored all the games I lost in the trade to my inventory.
I also asked them why I was never notified that the game(s) had been removed (I noticed it myself and contacted support about it), but never got a satisfying answer.
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I'm pretty sure I would have gotten nothing if I didn't write a support ticket. But I'm not qualified to answer this question for all users.
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2 things - that is a ridiculously paranoid and childish assertion, although obviously, you losing some inventory items (games or otherwise) is no loss to them. Tell me please, how would you go about running batch queries on your DB every day, several times, to find items that were obviously part of a scam on someone? What would the defining variables be? And how much of a performance hit would it entail on your infrastructure?
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lol, what?
What are even talking about "running batch queries"?
When the payment is reversed, they automatically take the game from the scammed person's inventory, it would be trivial, even sensible, to also at that time reverse the trade transaction in which the game was acquired. It is their TOS that state you are protected in this way. Of course it might be complicated by chains of trades, but still the TOS applies and you don't even get notification (which is mostly what my post was about).
"you losing some inventory items (games or otherwise) is no loss to them"
No, it's a loss to the scammed. I suggested they would rather you didn't notice because they may be a cost to Valve if a new game key is required for a 3rd party game. Maybe there isn't, Valve probably have it in the contracts now.
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lol, queries are how you work with a database. Batch queries are either automatically or manually created / updated queries you run at night (for example), that include a large "batch" of queries / modifications to the DB, all in one go. Just like in a bank, when you transfer money to someone else's account at night, that transaction happens as part of a batch later on - hence it arriving at a certain time.
You wouldn't want to do the trade reversal (or rather returning of items to the scammed) as an automatic course of action, such as what happens when someone revokes payment. The billing database would be linked to other databases, and be able to "invalidate" a certain item automatically, as like they say in many companies with billing DB's - "billing is bible", i.e. what's in the billing DB always takes precedence over anything else any other DB / view might say. But like you said, stuff that's a part of a trade can be part of quite a complex chain and needs to, always, be checked out manually, by a human.
I suggested batch queries as the next most automated form of interaction with your DB to fix shit - people can view a ticket, decide to reverse a trade, and throw such into a batch for processing. But even then, like I said, what would your variables be? How would you tell your DB "this item doesn't belong to this user, but to this one"? Or rather, "this item was part of a fraudulent trade"? Especially if part of a longer chain of trades?
Have you ever worked with a database?
As for "I suggested they would rather you didn't notice because they may be a cost to Valve if a new game key is required for a 3rd party game" - that makes no sense. Valve doesn't have to add any value into the trade in any form, we're talking about reversing a trade. Explain one situation to me where Valve would have to actually pay for- oh wait, I just read your sentence again..
Smart-ass, Valve doesn't offer support for any keys of any kind, logically. The only situation they can intervene in is inventory items / trades. i.e. traceable transactions on their own DB, with items that are clearly marked as used or not. And in such case, all they're doing is modifying their database, changing who's inventory an item(s) is in so someone gets the stuff they traded off back, not actually buying a new game for the scammed person, lol.
Scams hurt the scammed financially, they don't earn Valve cash, or cost them cash. The only paranoid thing you can say is, maybe, that if someone gets scammed, they might buy the game they were scammed with themselves in the Steam store, since they didn't get it from the trade, giving a little more cash to Valve - hence, Valve likes people being scammed because they can make more money this way. Which is a ludicrously absurd theory.
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"Have you ever worked with a database?"
Yes actually and been paid for doing so.
I'm not going to get into an argument about how Valve do it, because that really isn't the point.
The underlying fact is, when you lose the traded item(s), the item(s) you traded to get said item are legally yours by Valve's own trading TOS.
If the game is 3rd party and has been redeemed and played, Valve do not have automatically have the right give out another copy. Like I said Valve probably have this covered in contracts with publishers now so they do have this right one way or another.
Even if it were too complicated to just reverse the trade and lets just say it is, you should at the very least get notified something has been removed from your library. In this case it is clearly in Valve's interest you do not notice since dealing with it manually costs man hours of support staff. I refer back to my original post which you had such issue with "It seems they don't say, because if you don't notice, you don't get you stuff back and they like it that way"
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"It seems they don't say, because if you don't notice, you don't get you stuff back and they like it that way" says "they like you not getting your stuff back" - nothing about "they don't like putting in man hours to get you your stuff back."
"If the game is 3rd party and has been redeemed and played.." What are you talking about with that line? If you're the one who got scammed with this 3rd party title, redeemed and played the game, great, so what? It was a bad item (for whatever reason, such as revoked payment), they remove it from your library. You complain, get the items you originally traded off for the game back from Valve, so the trade is reversed. If you traded off this 3rd party game, and someone else already redeemed it, again, so? Valve removes it from their library, you get your items back, done. I fail to see in what part of the process Valve should be giving you out another copy, as long as the fraudulent trade is reversed?
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Hmmm... I wonder if they will give you the games back or w/e.
The trading policy talks about redeeming games that were traded for, but initially bought illegally but doesn't say anything about what happens if you don't redeem the game...
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tell them that you will sue them because they broke policy.
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i disagree...even the hint of legal action will give them a great reason to pay attention...its much cheaper to them to handle this quietly without getting stuck on a court record and paying some overpriced lawyer, compared to the cost of a single video game
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How is it not the game you wanted? Did you not trade fot Dark Souls?
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"The deal was I should get dark souls in return for some copies of street fighter while it was on sale"
I disagree.
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well its not logical that i got dark souls back, it´s not paid plus the scammer keeps my games because they are paid. i don´t care if i´ll get back dark souls or if i get street fighter but no matter what it will be, i want it as a tradeable item in my inventory where it was supposed to be.
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They should've been removed when you received dark souls. Check his inv? Also, they'd see the transaction as whatever you paid for the streetfighters being the dark souls price.
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alright, update #3
now im getting threatened...
i was asking for his supervisor because i wanted to complain about his service. the answer was: he can´t help me anymore, any following message will be considered as spam and results in a deactivation of my account.
this is not how you treat a paying customer!
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Sucks man. The fact that there is no live chat or phone option for steam support tells you all you need to know about their care for the customer. As much as people dig on call centers/live email with someone who doesn't have command of the language of the complainant, it is light years better than what Steam offers.
On the bright side, it looks like you actually had a real person respond to you instead of a bot :) It only took a week for that. I just find it amazing that that peon CS rep cares so much to defend their employer's shady business practices.
I still think that eventually this is going to bite them in the butt. O'Doyle Rules style.
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well, this is not over yet. i finally figured out where i can complain about the customer treatment of their support employees. lets see what kind of answer i will get there. i bet it will be something like "please send a screenshot of the CD-key or if you bought the game on steam send us the transaction number and details"
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at first: the communication with steam support has not ended yet - so this does not mean im here to complain or cry about what happened.
anyway, this is the story:
a little more than 8 month ago i traded with some guy. the deal was i should get dark souls in return for some copies of streetfighter while it was on sale. all games involed were steam items - no keys involved in this trade. his profile was not an alt and looked legit, he was not marked as a scammer at steamrep.com, so i decided to do that trade. now after all the time steam revoked that game and told me the payment for it wasn´t correct, but so far they refuse to give me the games back i bought and traded for it.
pic of trade history
the user i got the games from has been offline now for more than 30 days and i doubt he will come online and fix this. i also doubt that there is a proof steamrep.com would accept to mark that guy as a scammer.
did this happen to anyone else? was there a solution after all this time? is there a chance that i can revoke my payment via paypal after all this time?
thx in advance for all answers
--update #1
support answered to my quote of the policy:
"I have registered the game Dark Souls on your account. It is a one-time assistance. Please, in the future only trade with people you know and trust. We will not recover anything other games or objects."
well, so far i got a game back, not the game i wanted and not where i wanted to have it but it´s a good start.
--update #2
after my complaints about getting dark souls activated instead of getting it in my inventary like intended they just closed my ticket. i reopened it and asked in a not-so-kind way for that sopportpersons boss.
--update #3
now im getting threatened...
i was asking for his supervisor because i wanted to complain about his service. the answer was: he can´t help me anymore, any following message will be considered as spam and results in a deactivation of my account.
this is not how you treat a paying customer!
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