Can Outpost mods do this?

[Дебра]

I expect people to look at how recently the account was made. Checking where the items came from is easy also. You can always ask for an ID but thats a little creepy Debra.

 

What does checking how recently the account was made do? Tell you the guy is new? Are all new people complete idiots new to economies? No.

[Cookie Monster]

Exactly. This is a video game. Designed for enjoyment. I gain no enjoyment out of treating this as a serious business, scared of the 'authorities'. 

Then play the game. There are game modes involved in tf2 that dont involve trading. You act like the whole game is gone for you and that you can no longer play it.  Honestly if you are this salty of how the "authorities: are treating you then don't do things that involve them.

[Дебра]

Then play the game. There are game modes involved in tf2 that dont involve trading. You act like the whole game is gone for you and that you can no longer play it.  Honestly if you are this salty of how the "authorities: are treating you then don't do things that involve them.

 

Still doesn't stop it from being a video game. Video games should not be treated seriously.

[Cookie Monster]

What does checking how recently the account was made do? Tell you the guy is new? Are all new people complete idiots new to economies? No.

There are some new people that get lucky and unbox and would gladly prove they did so if asked.  IT would be a red flag if they didnt and had high value items. I guess you do not really care about rules any way so I am not sure why you are pushing this issue so much.

 

1. Knowingly trading with a hijacker alt account: http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threa...m.html

 

2. Impersonation of a Bazaar Staff member on one of his alts

 

3. Impersonation of a Harpoon Admin: https://forum.harpoongaming....15038/

[♥Nick♥]

Except this is a video-game. There are rules on third party sites. If you dont follow them you deal with what comes forth. Whether people agree or disagree with their bans it honestly does not matter. The Owner can make what ever rules he wants. He is allowing you to use his service.

There are rules in real life too or are you just some spoiled rich kid throwing money around like its nothing?

Or maybe you just live in your own little world where everything is perfect.

[Дебра]

There are some new people that get lucky and unbox and would gladly prove they did so if asked.  IT would be a red flag if they didnt and had high value items. I guess you do not really care about rules any way so I am not sure why you are pushing this issue so much.

 

1. Knowingly trading with a hijacker alt account: http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threa...m.html

 

2. Impersonation of a Bazaar Staff member on one of his alts

 

3. Impersonation of a Harpoon Admin: https://forum.harpoongaming....15038/

 

What does my SteamRep page have to do with anything?

I fail to see how simulating a dictatorship is fun.

[Cookie Monster]

There are rules in real life too or are you just some spoiled rich kid throwing money around like its nothing?

Yep I am completely some rich kid.  Do you know what happens when you break rules in real life? You get fined or you get arrested or even both. Do you think people agree with ALL laws in real life?  Either way this is still a game and should not be compared to real life which you seem to be too close minded to realize. For real this time I am off to bed .  Just remember though

[AmazingRussian]

To clarify any confusion, the reason I was not banned is because I just recently finished serving a 2 week ban for pretty much the same thing (accidentally bought a 10 key item for 9 keys from a scammer).

 

With that out of the way, I want to add my 2 cents on this.

 

First of all, age of steam account is hardly the end all be all metric to determining a scammer alt. This has already been addressed pretty well above. I personally was already hardcore trading within 2 months of installing steam. Not only that, 5+ year old steam accounts can be bought for basically pennies. If anything in my eyes I'm more suspicious when I see a 10+ year old account due to how commonly they are bought and sold.

 

With that said, you have to evaluate every account you trade with on multiple fronts, and not just one. There's the obvious things like checking steamrep, outpost, etc. But you also look at games played, games owned, steam level and such. You can't just discredit an account because it's lacking in one of these areas, and any area can be artifically inflated and holds no value on its own. Game hours can be afk'd, steam level can be bought for a couple keys, you can get tons of games for free, etc. Approaching it holistically the account in question looked solid on basically every front.

 

If I refused to trade with everyone who was under 1 year on steam, under 50 games owned, under 50 steam level, under 500 hours played, whatever number you want to put on those to feel good, I'd basically never trade with anyone. Period. The people who are getting high and mighty that claim they do this and we're all just dumb for not doing so and closing off 90+% of the trading population, are full of bs. All of this is also completely glossing over the time it takes when you're doing 50+ trades every day if not more, but whatever we all have infinite time.

 

Another concern that has been raised is the history of some of the items that this user owned had came from a banned user. This is again a solid point until you factor in time. If I had to check the history of every item that goes through my account or the account of the person I'm trading with, I'd probably be dead by now. Not exaggerating, even doing it for 24 hours a day it would not be possible.

 

-------------------------------------------

 

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I want to address the expectation that larger traders are some sort of robots that can go thousands upon thousands of trades and never slip up. I currently have 7000+ trades done, most of the other guys that traded with this user also have done thousands of trades. To expect that in thousands of trades not a single one has ever possibly been with a scammer, or someone that turned out to be a scammer, or a scammer alt, is ABSURD. I do my best to avoid trading with scammers, generally giving them a few choice words before blocking them. However, I would be lying if I said that I have never in all of my trades to date accidentally traded with someone who I later learned was a scammer, scammer alt, what have you.

 

In the end TF2OP can set the rules to whatever they want, its their website. In my slightly biased opinion though, for outpost to have a 2 strikes and your out policy irregardless of anything else is just plain ridiculous. Whether you trade with a scammer 2 trades out of 10, or 2 trades out of 10,000 you get permanently banned under the current rules. Avoiding scammers in 99.98% of your trades instead of 100% is worthy of a permanent ban according to TF2OP.

 

Edit: This post was written at 12 am so it probably has tons of spelling errors and is slightly rambly.

[Crabislav]

asdf

The infinite chain of trading with someone who traded someone who traded someone ... who is a scammer that gets you banned first and marked if done again is the most fucking retarded thing I've ever came across. This is in no way an attempt to keep the community safer, this is some bullshit considered smart across TF2OP, SR and FoG. I never understood how can people be so fucked in the head.

[Genzarata]

For the record I've read everything in this thread so far, which is why I felt obliged to post this:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/ScrambledAmmo/inventory/#730_2_3016095535
See this knife? My friend has less than 300 hours on CS:GO, less even than ret0rd, and yet has a knife worth almost £100 on SCM. And if you think, "Well 300 hours is actually quite a lot" or "£100 isn't really that much for a knife" - he bought it within about a week of playing the game. Better ban him for being an alt, right? Spending money on a game with only a few hours on it.
 

It is unfortunate that so many people were "tricked" by this "obvious" scammer alt.

 
The fact that you put obvious in quotation marks pretty much justifies the disgusted feeling shared by many in this thread.

[♠Derpeh♤]

The point where you said "Good ENOUGH"  should have been where you asked a Outpost admin whether he is okay to trade with or not. As if you are not 100% positive then you should not do the trade. I am not sure why people would even trust him enough to do paypal deals when he is that new to trading.     

 

Erm not sure if you did actually read or if you are just blindly following the "ban all people who trade with scammers" but if that apparently alt scammed many high tier traders which also includes an op mod how is that classified as a obvious scammer enough to warrant a permanent ban?

 

Obviously even if you did ask a mod if it was okay to trade with he would have said it was fine because even a op mod was fooled.

 

Also now a days you rarely see the "I started from a scrap" trader, many traders start up by downing some serious dollar and start from there heck half the people of these forums and many users who are "trading famous" started off like that. Fact is the guy had a legit account with games...etc only thing which was sus was the age of the account and most people wont jump the gun and say it's a scammer the op mod who fell for it is enough proof. It's easy for you to be all high and mighty calling him out to be a scammer because you know he is a scammer but if this was shown to you before you would probably have a different answer.

[Litwick]

Also, while outpost can technically do whatever they want, this reflects very poorly on them and definitely sets a very trigger happy tone for their moderation. Even worse because a mod from OP itself was also ""fooled"" by this ""obvious"" alt. It doesn't exactly instill confidence in OP if we can be banned for questionable reasons. 

 

Honestly, all of these bans were unjustified. Pretty much any average trader would examine this guy's profile and think he's legit. The only suspicious part of his profile was join date, but that alone isn't enough to warrant deeming someone suspicious. Arguably the history of the items could be suspicious, but I wouldn't be digging around into someone's inventory like that unless I was already suspicious of them. As has been shown by this thread and all the trusts that user accrued, it's obvious not many thought him shady enough to examine their items. 

[Professional Map Painter]

I guess it's their website but let's say sirploko knew what he was doing, then it would be unfair as hell if the mod got away with it. The mod wasn't the only one either, Amazing, skanshankar, etc.

This wouldn't be the first time. Things like this have been happening since OP started up in 2011, and they're not the only site that partakes in such hypocrisy.

 

The outpost mod as you can  read in his earlier post he was warned.

Right, warned instead of given a 2 week ban for trading with an oh so obvious scammer alt. This reeks of the same shit as the Wayne and GoV incidents.

[Milz187]

This is pretty silly and it sucks to hear, these bans are very unjust and there's a level of discrimation here towards new users. Out of 100 people with a similar profile 2 could be an alt (made up numbers ofcourse) I don't see how it's fair to expect traders to label each of the 100 as a scammer.

 

Bob was very active when he first started trading, do you go back and ban everyone that traded with Bob? No you don't as they don't deserve to be banned.

 

The people that are banned due to this did pretty much the same thing that people did when they traded with Bob when he was new, neither of them could have known if either was a scammer alt. This community has reached a point where you can just get caught in the firing line.

[Gren]

Could I ask everyone to try to keep it civil on my behalf and of the others that were banned as a result of this?  I don't want this to be locked, and I'd like to hear more opinions on this judgment.  Good to hear from the OP mods, btw.  

[fmca]

Very interesting to hear from a number of people on this.

 

At the end of the day these judgements are morally inadequate, neurotic and appear to exhibit double standards with the treatment of the OP mod.

 

Of course, this is only an Outpost ban we're talking about and the owner can do whatever he wants with the site. Including drive people and higher-tier traders afraid of being caught in the quasi-judicial crossfire over to Bazaar.

[cares]

Of course, this is only an Outpost ban we're talking about and the owner can do whatever he wants with the site. Including drive people and higher-tier traders afraid of being caught in the quasi-judicial crossfire over to Bazaar.

 

You have to keep in mind a lot of victims here were Outpost Premium, they aren't your typical adblocking user. Outpost doesn't make exceptions in the ToS (neither does backpack), but refusing access to a paying customer, who doesn't get refunded (in fact if you'd chargeback you'd probably be marked on SR,) is quite different in the real world.

 

I'm not saying premium users should have any priority or privilege regarding these matters, but to say the site owner can do whatever they want with them is a bit absurd.

[fmca]

snippety snip

 

True, that the paid service has been withdrawn arbitrarily. In real life there would be civil cases to resolve that. I doubt there are provisions (?) in U.S. law for a service like Outpost though. Hence my point was the only consequence the site can have would be a loss of its (in particular) high-tier trader base to its competitors, notably Bazaar. The market can punish egregious company policies like that, on occasion.

[sirploko]

So a month ago I traded with this user: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198190859327, I bought around 300 keys from him for cash, he had a high steam level, good games + high hours

:

:

:

I love using TF2Outpost, I don't mean to offend/call out any of the staff of TF2Outpost if this is just a "small" mistake, but if Lt.Scout gets away because he's a mod or whatever reason, then i'm just done i guess.

 

EDIT:

It appears that almost everyone's been banned except Amazing and the Mod, everyone who's been appealing got the same response concluding that "ret0rd" was an "obvious" scammer alt.

 

rip

 

He had less than 100 hours at the time these cash trades happened and the account was just 9 weeks old at the time. From the SR FAQ:

 

 

 

http://forums.steamrep.com/pages/faq/

 

We have discussed the account at length and it does fulfill all of the requirements of an obvious alt. Steam level and the amount of games are NOT an indicator of someones trustworthyness.

 

 

As for your other point, this is not a small mistake, it is a deliberate action being taken after putting a lot of though and hours in. Amazing did not receive a ban, because his first OP caution was given to him (for another offense) on the same day he traded with ret0rd. In cases like that, we will not immediately place a permaban, since we do not hand out permas without cautioning a user first. The same goes for users that are being reported for trading with a scammer in 2013. If it is their first offense, we will ban and caution, but if they were cautioned in 2015, we obviously do not perma them for a trade that happened before the caution.

 

LtScout was not exempt from our attention either. Obviously this matter was dealt with internally and he will seize his trading activities on Outpost for the same duration a ban would last ( 2 weeks). He will continue working on his tickets though, so banning him is out of the question.

[Frostbane]

Yep, Frost who traded with 3 scammers/scammer alts before this trade occurred. makes me really think that who ever he trades with next is trustworthy.

 

I also traded with 16,797 who were not scammers/alts. 

 

 

 

Where did I say humans are perfect? If you repeat a mistake 5 times then its no longer a mistake.  Look at debug.mode he has most likely done more trades then frost and has not "screwed up" 5 times. Also In no way am I saying that SR and Tf2op shouldnt change their rules. As earlier I was talking to Penguin The Fluffy. He came up with this great point that Alts are being harder to catch now due to there are multiple games that involve trading and cross game trading is getting popular. 

 

He is being careless is my point whether you agree with me or not . 

 

Edit: Time to go to bed. 2;20 Am is past my bedtime.

 

 

5 is a lot of mistakes if you made 10 attempts. Not a lot if you made 100 attempts. Even less when you make 1000 attempts. It looks miniscule in 17,000 attempts. debug is an amazing trader and he has helped me a lot. But I'm pretty sure i've made more trades than him in my 12 months here. He's been around a year longer than me. Only way to verify is by asking him.

 

You said i'm being careless. Since the time I started trading i've made 17,000 trades. Let's say only 7,000 of those were high value trades. 5 mistakes in 7,000 trades is an accuracy of 99.92%. How is that number careless? In the process of trading those 5 alts I have also declined trades from hundreds if not thousands of scammers/alts.

 

Scammer alts can take a thousand different appearances. It's unrealistic to expect us to be able to identify all of them. We are traders and not investigators. We do not have the tools, knowledge and experience investigators have. It's not like we blindly traded the guy, we went through a decision making process using the rules and guidelines that are provided to us. (I can't speak for all of us, but it sounds like most who have replied here did)  It especially does not help when the rules and guidelines are vague. From what I know, the rules and guidelines are intentionally left vague so people don't attempt to find loop holes to abuse them, and that makes perfect sense. However, the consequence of having vague rules is also, that you get more people unknowingly or unintentionally breaking them.

 

All throughout SR's FAQ page you can see the words "knowingly" trading with "obvious" scammers. To me it sounds like the goal behind these rules are to punish people who are intentionally doing this for their gain, not to punish people that happen to have done them without knowing it or intending it. I did not knowingly trade this guy, nor do I think it was an obvious alt. I'm fairly confident at least 80% of traders would not think it was obvious. Yet i'm being punished for it. Permanently. 

[Gren]

snip

 

So that's it then, no quarter given.  

 

Sirploko, I respect your rules.  You guys are the ones providing a service, and I use that service.  As such, I am subject to your rules.  I also appreciate the fact that these bans were not carried out carelessly and were discussed, apparently at some length.  However, there is evidently a considerable difference in the conclusions that you and the other OP staff members reached and the opinion of some of the people who posted in this thread.   

 

To be perfectly clear:  I am not arguing that there should be no penalty against trading with scammers and their alts.  That's not what this is about.   What it is about for me, is identifying scammer alts beyond reasonable doubt.   There is a spectrum on which you can place any account:  i.e. a Steam level 75, 4000 hrs in-game, 100s of games and an expenisve backpack and clean SR is highly unlikely to be a scammer alt.  On the other hand, a steam level 1 account, with 5 hrs in game, 3 free to play games and a backpack made up of 10 unusuals is most likely a scammer alt.  I argue that this account does not fall on the extreme end of the spectrum.   Yes, he had some of the warning signs, but he also had some indicators which generally belong to legitimate accounts.  It is precisely this which makes him not an obvious scammer alt.  

 

This guy fooled plenty of people, including one of your own mods, and at least two high-tier, experienced traders - me and Frost  The fact that we all left rep for this guy shows that there was no malicious intent.  Had we known that this guy was probably a scammer alt, we wouldn't have left rep for everyone to see - that would just be plain stupid.   We all fell for it, and now we're paying the price because someone who's marked on SR managed to sneak back into the legitimate community and operate there for at least a few months.   

 

EDIT:  I also think that we need to acknowledge exactly what an OP ban represents for someone like me who trades pretty much exclusively in unusuals:  it means your trading career is basically over.  Sure, you can use the other sites, but we all know they don't receive nearly as much traffic for hats as OP does.  So what's left for us now?  Be that guy who adds everyone, sends 100 trade offers a day, constantly trying to explain their OP ban?  No thanks, I work a full time job and I wouldn't have time for this style of trading even if I wanted to.   I'm not bringing this up to ask for special treatment, I'm bringing it up to highlight the fact just how severe an OP ban actually is for active traders.  As such, these bans should be treated with outmost caution, and should be carried out only if the possibility of reasonable doubt has been removed.  Was this really the case here?  Was there no reasonable doubt this was a scammer alt?  

[fmca]

Snip

 

I hesitate to disagree with someone as experienced as sirploko but I do. Maybe I'm wrong, sure. But I know I'm not alone in where I fall on this and there seems to be a significant split in opinion between the mods and the traders on this case.

 

Gren, you should try to use bazaar etc. It could do with more traffic for sure but perhaps a site that is more transparent or that has rules around this area that are much clearer is in a position to take up more market share. Just a thought, I can understand why you'd say enough at this point.

[Mr Prince]

_{Does't look that obvious to me if you keep in mind that he traded 1 month ago and the guy he traded with just got flagged today as an alt account of another scammer.}

If the alt account was flagged 1 month ago it would been obvious but this is not the case.

Sounds like trigger happy action, without considering the times traded or the fact that alt account just got flagged today.

 

Could be wrong though i don't see why ban is justified, but if he already was flagged 1 month ago my opinion would change, however that is not the case.

[sirploko]

 There is a spectrum on which you can place any account:  i.e. a Steam level 75, 4000 hrs in-game, 100s of games and an expenisve backpack and clean SR is highly unlikely to be a scammer alt.  On the other hand, a steam level 1 account, with 5 hrs in game, 3 free to play games and a backpack made up of 10 unusuals is most likely a scammer alt.  I argue that this account does not fall on the extreme end of the spectrum.   Yes, he had some of the warning signs, but he also had some indicators which generally belong to legitimate accounts.  It is precisely this which makes him not an obvious scammer alt.  

 

This guy fooled plenty of people, including one of your own mods, and at least two high-tier, experienced traders - me and Frost  The fact that we all left rep for this guy shows that there was no malicious intent.  Had we known that this guy was probably a scammer alt, we wouldn't have left rep for everyone to see - that would just be plain stupid.   We all fell for it, and now we're paying the price because someone who's marked on SR managed to sneak back into the legitimate community and operate there for at least a few months.   

 

I mentioned it briefly above already, but I will explain our reasoning on this judgement a bit more comprehensively:

 

When the matter was brought to my attention by a former staff member, the first thing I did was seeking out advice from 2 of our most experienced ex-admins. They looked at the account and agreed, that for anybody that is somewhat experienced in trading and knows about scammer alts, they should have seen the red flags.

 

The SR FAQ, by which we go when we judge if a user should be able to identify an alt, lists these points:

 

• Low hours of TF2/DotA with a deep knowledge of item values
• New Steam start date, but eager to trade high value items
• Private backpack, and with no rep threads
• Quickselling fresh items that are less than a day old in their backpack
• Nearly empty game backpack except for a few high value items with very recent history

- He had just around 100 hours in TF2 at the time of the first trust rating (342h now)

- His Steam join date is April 9th 2015

- His BP was not private

- He immediately started selling items that came out of nowhere, he started with CSGO skins though, but moved to high value TF2 items soon after.

 

- His BP never had any items worth mentioning until May 30th, when it first spiked with the addition of 2 Sunbeams unusuals:

http://backpack.tf/profiles/76561198190859327?time=1432969200

 

Within 6 days there was a Scorching Kabuto added, with the 2 Beams hats still there.

http://backpack.tf/profiles/76561198190859327?time=1433574000

 

By the time most of you traded with him, end of June and thereafter, he was cashing out already, after trading for less than 2 months:

 

I can see how some of the people who traded with him could look at his profile, see level 40 and 30 games and move on from there. But that is not how a thorough check should be done. If you looked at the SR pointers instead, you see someone that has 4 out of 5 red flags.

 

Obviously scammers want to make their alts appear legitimate and the easiest and fastest way to do that is to customize their Steam profile, buying games and levels to make it appear like a normal users. But that is not a decisive factor when it comes to judging a user for being an alt.

 

Especially the users that already had a ban for trading with scammers under their belt should have been extra careful. You were cautioned and warned by one of us, that the next time a ban will be permanent. This means that for every trade with someone you don't know for a fact is clean, you are responsible to diligently check the stats above. And if you do trade, despite them looking less than stellar in that regard, you do so at your own risk.

 

Sure, if he had no profile picture, no games, no levels, etc. it would have been more obvious, but these are not the things that matter in terms of OBVIOUSNESS. These are just for first glances, the background check entails much more.

 

And yes he did fool a lot of traders (Scout was not a staff member then though), but not because the SR FAQ pointers were oblique, but because people did not look past his Steam profile and trust page. We have dozens of traders who never ever traded with scammers, despite being in the trading game for years. It's not just luck on their part, they are extremely cautious and check these things not because they fear reprisal, but because they despise scammers.

 

I am not pointing any fingers, but a lot of traders do not share this attitude. If they could get away with a good deal, by trading a scammer or alt undetected, they would (and trust me we have had many of these instances, although this is not one of them).

 

So to sum it up, the guy was an obvious alt by the standards that matter and 10 minutes of research should have raised enough red flags to just sell or buy your keys from another source.

 

I do not accuse any of you of trading knowingly with a scammer alt, or with malicious intent, and I'm sure most of you did trades with similar users before that did not turn out to be alts, but that is the risk you take when you go by your gut feeling instead of looking at the factual evidence.

[sirploko]

_{Does't look that obvious to me if you keep in mind that he traded 1 month ago and the guy he traded with just got flagged today as an alt account of another scammer.}

If the alt account was flagged 1 month ago it would been obvious but this is not the case.

Sounds like trigger happy action, without considering the times traded or the fact that alt account just got flagged today.

 

Could be wrong though i don't see why ban is justified, but if he already was flagged 1 month ago my opinion would change, however that is not the case.

 

We do not ban or tag users for being alts without solid evidence. We get a lot of reports about suspicious users, which we simply can not ban because we can't connect them to a scammer. That does not mean however, that you can trade with shady looking people, thinking they would have gotten banned already if something was up. Sometimes it takes a while for evidence to surface that let's us take action.