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:

1. Friends
2. His/her network
3. Gaming history
4. Games owned
5. 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.