IndieGameStand has had $30,759.42 in fraudulent credit card charges and transactions.
That is a lot for a small niche site like ours and almost all of it revolves around Steam key scamming and reselling. This problem isn’t getting any better either when you consider that 86% of the that total has come in the past year.
Here’s how the scam works: You get a bunch of stolen credit card numbers and then go to a legit Steam key reseller site and use the stolen info to buy the digital codes. You grab as many codes as you can and then go over to one of these gray market resellers and turn your keys into real money since you bought them with stolen cards. Meanwhile, the website and/or developer that you purchased the key from gets a credit card chargeback or other dispute 30-60 days later.
Why have I wasted so much time on the problem? This scam really pisses me off – mainly because these people aren’t stealing from large rich corporations but taking advantage of smaller companies and indie developers. For indie developers and sites like IndieGameStand, every purchase means a lot. Indie Game Developers struggle to get every one of their games released and are often struggling financially. This is the very reason that IndieGameStand has paid out developers for these invalid purchases and taken the financial hit instead of passing it on to the smaller indie dev teams. If anyone at Valve is reading this, I would love to have some sort of backend API tool where I could input stolen codes and hurt the hackers’ reps on whatever marketplace they are using to resell keys. It would be a nice tool for developers to stop the Youtube/Streamer problem too aka how to get every game on Steam for free.
Note that the sites being criticized are different from places like GMG/CDkeys which source their keys from distributors in foreign markets. G2A and Kingwin are brokers for key resellers, which are used by thieves and scammers to sell to third parties. These sites are the issue.
So the cost of stolen credit cards have to be eaten by the merchants? I always thought that was covered by the CC companies. Apparently, and sadly, not, it seems.
Yep. And even better: if you get too many chargebacks, your credit card authorizer will raise your transaction rates. . . or even cancel your account altogether!
Taking credit cards blows in exactly every way but one: most of the time, you get (~96% of) some person’s money.
That said, there’s somewhat of a fix for this. Don’t use Steam resellers. And if you do, make sure those keys are region (and even language) limited. Of course easier said than done, since it probably means losing a percentage of the revenue stream, but for most numbers I’ve seen, it;s a small percentage.
But I don’t think this is what is killing the indie market.
Not to be holier than thou, but all CD key reselling is grey market. I don’t know how anyone could look at something like GMG and not think its shady as all get out. At he least they’re screwing publishers through carriage rate differences.
Yeah, I view GMG as about as immoral as VPNing around stupid-as-fuck region-locks on Netflix TV shows, with half the effort required! It’s a very different ballgame than G2A.
G2A also have the most obnoxious fucking commercials in the universe.
I suppose on the positive side if key reselling is such a big thing it might equate to actual piracy being a bit less attractive to the new generation of crooks in gaming out there? Much easier to make a buck from a stolen steam key than putting up a cracked version of a game and tossing whatever hostage malware in there to make pennies down the line?
They are legit in that they won’t rip you off if you pay their “protection” fee. They aren’t legit in that they don’t vet where the keys come from. I only buy from sellers with thousands of successful transactions, figuring that any large scale criminals wouldn’t stick around.
So it’s not Steam key resellers killing indie developers, it’s stolen credit cards, right? You eliminate one problem, you fix the other.
Sadly, credit card companies have little incentive to fix the problem… those chargeback fees they make merchants pay are probably raking in millions of dollars.
Ultimately yes, but there’s a little chicken-and-egg going on as well. Credit card thieves are taking advantage of the automated wild west key reselling on these sites to make money off those cards. It’s an easy way to turn the stolen cards into money, with little to no risk for the thief. You could argue that without that marketplace, it would make it that much harder to flip the cards on their black market forums.
So… what is it that makes this industry special and unable to deal with fraud that others are? Dropshipping electronics with stolen cards has been around for ages. Difficulty of prosecution since most of these people are (presumably) overseas? Or is it simply more rampant because the key ties it to an account like Steam and makes the purchase feel more legit vs buying a burned DVD on the street?
Yeah, I’m guessing not selling a physical product makes the whole process much simpler for money launderers. I’m also guessing grey markets don’t actually want to crack down on those practices too much since they probably know a whole bunch of their sold keys are shady.
Woodlance has it. There’s no physical product, the market has high demand, and the products themselves have very fluid pricing, so illegitimate pricing looks as believable as the legit stuff.
Because it isn’t? They’ve admitted to sourcing a certain number of “grey” keys but they have official relationships with many publishers and get the majority of their keys from that source. The falloff is pretty rapid from there, though.
Yes, it is a thing. But I don’t think it is contained to damaging indies or steam, though they may be hit harder with thinner margins. Ducked into ESO again recently, and in one guild some people were telling folks to buy off kinguin as it is cheap. I just checked, both steam copies, and ESO direct keys are available, as are things advertised as game-vendor keys (non-steam) and 30-60 day time cards for other MMOs, non-steam.
I think this may hit anything that is buy to play, or offering digital 3rd party in-game redeemable “cash shop currency” packs.
After one of the cycles, of go to kinguin, they have it cheap … only one person responded with a “but consider the source”. There are multiple things here, not just grey keys, but out of region keys too. Many gamer’s are poorer it seems. Many, now on a laptop, after they pay for the internet/cable saving $10 on a DLC is HUGE. I watched all my kids game, that generation is now in their 20s. They would almost all go to the key reseller site to save $10, even knowing they keys were grey, shady, or scamming the publisher, as long as they keys were good. There is only one caveat, which makes the OP linked article more interesting. The only time they’d consider buying the full-price, direct, defintely non-scam would be from an indie developer. They know the behavior would hurt an indie more and would do it to support them. They feel less bad doing it to a bigger company.
