Why is Valve not doing anything about those phishing bots?

They kind of did by adding restrictions to brand new accounts. New steam accounts will need to purchase minimum of 5 dollars/euros? (not sure) before they're able to send friend requests and post.

For existing bots, all you can do is report and block. Not sure how much is being done about it though.

The way I see it, Valve's under no obligation to do anything about it. So they probably won't. If it's not going to line up their pockets with cash, it's not worth looking into for them. But who knows what the future will bring.

At any rate, just block the obvious bots and move on.

Captchas can be "gamed" by outsourcing the work on mturk or something similar, but it would provide a barrier. I don't think Valve really has an incentive to eliminate bots as they can count those accounts towards their "total number of users" for posterity/ bragging rights.

What more you expect them to do ? They already preventing new accounts from crap like this but there is still shitload of old accounts made by bots. It`s trading sites like CSGO Lounge which should restrict private / new / shady accounts out of use... BUUUUUT Since 90% of cs:go players are also private / retarded / shady i doubt it will ever happen ;)

Also this problem is not as big as it used to be half year ago while every bump at Lounge or Outpost gave you 5 - 6 - 7 invites and you couldnt tell if its real or fake . Now you can easily see who is that at steam. So just get used to it like most of us did especially now since like i`ve said its not as big problem as it used to be.

Why should they care?

I'm really not sure why they haven't done something about it yet, but I'd like to think that it's being worked on. Perhaps we'll get a better system than a captcha system.

"Csgo lounge"

I think I found your problem...

It's quite hard to actually do anything about them that will not negatively impact honest customers. As long as there is another human overseeing these bots, there really is not anything you can do, if they are using stolen accounts. Limiting the amount of connections that can come from a single IP would negatively impact internet cafés, student dorms and so on.

There are limits to what Valve can do. Plus no matter what you do people will always find a way to try and scam

They did, the 5$ thing really cut down on them imho. I'v not gotten random lvl0/unassigned invites in ages.

You mention CSGO Lounge as if it has anything to do with Valve... You ARE aware that CSGO Lounge is not owned, operated, or in any way affiliated with Valve/Steam, right?

don't bump your threads up on CSGO Lounge

Add them to ignore list, there are about 50-60 of those in my ignore list. After the new rules I'm occasional getting 1 invite from a bot. Making new bots not worth it nowadays, after $5 rule was introduced. All you need is to add old ones into ignore list.

This guy keeps making more bots

View attached image.

I haven't seen any since they added that rule about owning some games before you can use your account.

They didn't do anything about it? They keep doing everything about it all the time. Steam is getting more and more restricted because of it, but it's impossible to just stop it. They added that annoying link filter to steam to warn you that the link could be dangerous before letting you access it, they restricted steam features unless you paid 5$ at least on that steam account and someone told me that you needed to wait a month before buying new games with a new account, but I'm not sure if that's true. The whole reason Humble Bundle minimum price became 1$ instead of 1cent is because of those assholes who would just buy those bundles in bulk and then use those cheap keys to make fake accounts to let themselves look like they're legit users. They added a report trader function to be able to mark scammers, but instead the scammers are mass reporting legit users if they fail to scam them.

It's all so annoying that people abuse the system and ruining it for others, but nothing can be done about it. It's mostly coming from Russia, where people are extremely poor and extremely immoral. They'll be assholes to anyone who isn't their friend, even if it's a Russian person as well. Not all of them are like that, but unfortunately the asshole ones are the ones you'll be hearing about most of the time.

I don't see the problem here, fishing boats provide us with seafood, which is healthy and nutritious.