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PSA: Trading with bp.tf automatic WILL count towards your trades with scammers on TF2Outpost


sirploko

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We were recently made aware of some trades users did with scammers or scammer alts that were not tagged or banned on backpack.tf and during our investigation these users told us that the trades were made via bp.tf automatic.

 

Since this is a rather new development for us, we had to discuss how this applies to our rules, regarding trades with scammers or scammer alts. The verdict is, that you will be held accountable for any trades you do with your account(s). Excluding these trades from our rule would not be sensible in any way, since it would create an unfair double standard and would be open to abuse.

 

So please take notice:

 

If you sell or buy items via the bp.tf automated process and the buyer / seller turns out to be an obvious scammer alt (more info on how to spot those can be found here: http://forums.steamrep.com/pages/faq/) or a user that has been banned on Outpost for scamming related offenses, you will be eligible for a ban. The length of said ban will be depending on the case at hand.

 

If you have any questions about this, please ask and I will try to answer here as fast and comprehensive as possible.

 

 

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Excluding these trades from our rule would not be sensible in any way, since it would create an unfair double standard and would be open to abuse.

 

How about listing items with value less than bill's hat?

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You can only sell items via automatic, if someone is offering to pay you b/o I really don't see how it can be considered helping a scammer...etc

 

Why make rules so to fobid the use convenient tools, we cant control who you sell to, it's the same as listing on scm.

 

EDIT: 

 

As off feb 2015 Automatic

  • 153920 completed trades

Of those trades you said you have 5 reports. Those 5 reports are enough to have you regulate what we do and opening our users to be attacked from sinister scammers out of spite... Especially since bp.tf reports and gets many users banned on top of being a community which tries to price items receiving a bulk of the hate form the trading community. A+ for logic. Clearly helping out the community here.

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Sirploko, I respect you and what you do, but this is... insane.

 

Why do we mark people who trade with scammers? Because they were deliberately, or at the very least negligently, assisting the undesirables within our community.

They had the ability to prevent a trade with a scammer and they failed to do so, willingly or otherwise.

 

With an automatic trade, it is impossible to prevent the trade with the scammer, due to the very design of the system.

 

This isn't a PSA, this is Outpost denying anyone the ability to use automatic trades to sell items worth over six keys.

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I don't entirely get how selling something to a scammer on Automatic is different from selling to one on SCM (unknowingly of course), which last time I checked you can't be banned for.

 

I'm all for making it hard for scammers to buy things, but I'm not exactly sure how this policy will work out.

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Oh hi Mister scammer/alt Friend. No, I can't trade with you. Oh, whats that....yea, I can launder your stuff. Give me a moment so I can put keys or whatever on my auto bot. That way I can trade with you and claim I had no involvement. 

 

The reason no one gets away with the excuse "my friend was over my house and I didn't know he scammed while I was AFK" is no different. 

 

Sorry, but you are responsible with what your account does, PERIOD.  If you are thinking using a bot is a loophole, then you have another thing coming.

 

Both Valve and SteamRep have already made this crystal clear. YOU are responsible for anything that happens to with or on your account. 

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I'm glad I'm already banned

That is such a ridiculous rule.

 

They had no intent to do the trade with the scammer. You should not be banned for that

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Oh hi Mister scammer/alt Friend. No, I can't trade with you. Oh, whats that....yea, I can launder your stuff. Give me a moment so I can put keys or whatever on my auto bot. That way I can trade with you and claim I had no involvement. 

 

Sorry, but you are responsible with what your account does, PERIOD.  If you are thinking using a bot is a loophole, then you have another thing coming. 

 

You're automatically assuming malice of anybody using automatic, is what you're saying.

 

And thus the rift between bp.tf and outpost widens.

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Oh hi Mister scammer/alt Friend. No, I can't trade with you. Oh, whats that....yea, I can launder your stuff. Give me a moment so I can put keys or whatever on my auto bot. That way I can trade with you and claim I had no involvement. 

 

Sorry, but you are responsible with what your account does, PERIOD.  If you are thinking using a bot is a loophole, then you have another thing coming. 

 

I agree with this, but then why is it okay for scammers to buy your stuff on SCM? (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, not that I ever planned on selling to scammers on SCM (or anyone for that matter, 15% tax is big :/))

 

I understand the reason for the policy, even if it is strict, but I don't understand the inconsistency.

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Oh hi Mister scammer/alt Friend. No, I can't trade with you. Oh, whats that....yea, I can launder your stuff. Give me a moment so I can put keys or whatever on my auto bot. That way I can trade with you and claim I had no involvement. 

 

Sorry, but you are responsible with what your account does, PERIOD.  If you are thinking using a bot is a loophole, then you have another thing coming. 

Except that's when you willingly do that, sometimes your bot can do that if the scammer enters in the right amount of pure/item and you might not be at the computer at the time. It doesn't seem fair to punish someone for something you couldn't prevent. If the rule was revised if you did the auto bot loophole willingly, then yes, it deserves a ban 

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I agree with this, but then why is it okay for scammers to buy your stuff on SCM? (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, not that I ever planned on selling to scammers on SCM (or anyone for that matter, 15% tax is big :/))

 

I understand the reason for the policy, even if it is strict, but I don't understand the inconsistency.

You are semi right. The SCM is supposedly anonymous. But as we all know, people who have identified scammers that are selling items and the people that have bought items that way have been banned and marked. 

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Sirploko, I respect you and what you do, but this is... insane.

 

Why do we mark people who trade with scammers? Because they were deliberately, or at the very least negligently, assisting the undesirables within our community.

They had the ability to prevent a trade with a scammer and they failed to do so, willingly or otherwise.

 

With an automatic trade, it is impossible to prevent the trade with the scammer, due to the very design of the system.

 

This isn't a PSA, this is Outpost denying anyone the ability to use automatic trades to sell items worth over six keys.

 

I see your point, but it is not our intention to inconvenience you. Outpost has set itself very high standards when it comes to keeping its community clean of scammers and users who trade with them. These rules were set in place by our founder and his colleagues and we will keep enforcing them. After all, getting banned on Outpost may itself be a very big inconvenience, but unless you were banned for scamming yourself, we do not ban other users who trade with those that were banned for repeatedly trading with scammers (unless they get tagged of course).

 

The problem lies in the army of scammer alts, that get created every day and users who think just because someone is not marked or banned yet, he is safe to trade with. If we would let those trades slide, our rules would have no teeth at all, since all a scammer would have to do is make an alt to sell his stolen goods.

 

I don't know enough about bp.tf automatic, but in cases of valuable items, would it be that terrible to just go by regular trade offers and taking your time to check out the user? It's not like those things are selling like cupcakes, so a potential buyer or seller surely would have the patience to wait out a regular trade offer.

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You are semi right. The SCM is supposedly anonymous. But as we all know, people who have identified scammers that are selling items and the people that have bought items that way have been banned and marked. 

So that isn't applying to automatic because...

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Except that's when you willingly do that, sometimes your bot can do that if the scammer enters in the right amount of pure and you might not be at the computer at the time. It doesn't seem fair to punish someone for something you couldn't prevent. If the rule was revised if you did the auto bot loophole willingly, then yes, it deserves a ban 

And that's the problem....how do you know if its willingly or not?  You don't. Anyone questioned will naturally say their bot did it. That would cause everyone that trades to use this as an excuse and it would be impossible for anyone to prove different. 

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I don't know enough about bp.tf automatic, but in cases of valuable items, would it be that terrible to just go by regular trade offers and taking your time to check out the user? It's not like those things are selling like cupcakes, so a potential buyer or seller surely would have the patience to wait out a regular trade offer.

 

 

This isn't a PSA, this is Outpost denying anyone the ability to use automatic trades to sell items worth over six keys.

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While i do think that putting something up on automatic over 6 keys seems kinda silly, there is still the fact that some people do it. You also have to take into account that this bot does not know who is a scammer/scammer alt and who isn't. 

I can see how it can be hard to tell if someone used automatic to sell their item as opposed to actually doing the trade.

But still, this seems like, as Gent says, Outpost trying to stop people from using Automatic.

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I want to know why TF2Outpost has the right to set rules for features on a completely separate site. Makes little sense to me.

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I agree with this, but then why is it okay for scammers to buy your stuff on SCM? (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, not that I ever planned on selling to scammers on SCM (or anyone for that matter, 15% tax is big :/))

 

I understand the reason for the policy, even if it is strict, but I don't understand the inconsistency.

 

The difference is that a user can not know who a seller on the SCM is, since Valve made them anonymous. You could do a reverse image search on their profile picture and if it is unique enough, you'll be able to check the users SR, but that is not something we can require and if the profile picture is generic or widely used, not effective.

 

When the profiles were not anonymous, we did ban for SCM purchases in the past.

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The difference is that a user can not know who a seller on the SCM is, since Valve made them anonymous. You could do a reverse image search on their profile picture and if it is unique enough, you'll be able to check the users SR, but that is not something we can require and if the profile picture is generic or widely used, not effective.

 

When the profiles were not anonymous, we did ban for SCM purchases in the past.

 

So, wait a second, clarify for us.

 

Are you talking about buying from scammers, or selling to scammers? Or both?

One is reasonable and the other is insane, and hopefully you know which is which.

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I want to know why TF2Outpost has the right to set rules for features on a completely separate site. Makes little sense to me.

 

They're not setting rules for people on another site. Breaking this only effects your Outpost account. (I suppose you could argue that being banned from Outpost makes people less likely to trade with you on other sites, but that's true of any popular trading site, including bp.tf.)

 

That's like saying Outpost shouldn't bother you if you trade with scammers anywhere but Outpost.

 

There are some valid arguments against this rule, but that one is kind of silly.

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Except that's when you willingly do that, sometimes your bot can do that if the scammer enters in the right amount of pure/item and you might not be at the computer at the time. It doesn't seem fair to punish someone for something you couldn't prevent. If the rule was revised if you did the auto bot loophole willingly, then yes, it deserves a ban 

 

The problem is, that without the user admitting to it, we can never know if someone does it willingly. The same is trading with marked scammers knowingly. It is a taggable offense, but of course hardly anyone ever admits to it. We can not look into the minds of users, so we have to go by the facts. Outpost and backpack.tf are not affiliated, and as much as I appreciate the service bp.tf provides, we can not make our rules obsolete only because it inconveniences users that use the plug-in.

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The problem is, that without the user admitting to it, we can never know if someone does it willingly. 

If I'm not mistaken automatic has logs that allow someone to see whether a trade was accepted by a bot or not, so you can use that to decide if the bot accepted a trade from a scammer (not the bot owner's fault) or if the owner traded with the scammer of their own will.

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They're not setting rules for people on another site. Breaking this only effects your Outpost account. (I suppose you could argue that being banned from Outpost makes people less likely to trade with you on other sites, but that's true of any popular trading site, including bp.tf.)

 

That's like saying Outpost shouldn't bother you if you trade with scammers anywhere but Outpost.

 

There are some valid arguments against this rule, but that one is kind of silly.

I was just pointing it out since TF2Outpost seems to be the only site that butts into every trading site and formulates regulations on everything they have to offer (No offense to any Outpost staff). Sort of like how the U.S. affiliated themselves with practically ever foreign entanglement in modern days.
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I want to know why TF2Outpost has the right to set rules for features on a completely separate site. Makes little sense to me.

 

Outpost is a private site and if you use it, you agree to follow its rules. We do not set rules for other sites, but if there is a collision between a feature and our rules, users will have to choose if they are willing to take the risk of getting their access to Outpost denied. As much as users like to see the trading community as one entity, this is not the case.

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