Tackling Scam traders on Steam
What is Steam?
The market is huge!
Forbes reported that Steam sales constituted 50–70% of the US$4 billion market
Scammers on steam
- Middleman
- Web Based Scam
- Referral based scam - referral to get free game scam
- Phishing Malicious Links that inject viruses
- Trade Scams
- Undervalue scam
- Betlord scams
- Refusal to reciprocate
What have we done about it?
Literature
There aren't any currently available research papers doing analysis of scammers on steam.
We have read a few papers on Cheaters on Steam, Cheaters in MMORPG games, Online Gaming and Spam: Security Issues That Are Often Overlooked and a few more.
The data!
- Explored the Steam API and collected data for 5,000 users.
- Got information about:
- Friends
- His/her network
- Gaming history
- Games owned
- Inventory Analysis
Ground truth
We have written a script to scrape data out of SteamRep, a website run by the community that tags scammers.
End Goal
Make a plugin that analyses profiles and checks if its safe to trade with the user.
Tackling scam traders on Steam
By Aneesh Dogra
