They have literally no reason to speak to you through the chat function, especially not about your items. They have access to the backend, if they really need to do something to your inventory, they can just do it. If they do contact you, they have their own system for doing so, you'll see a unique notification on Steam indicating that support is contacting you.



Images from OrnaBug on Twitter

They will never add you as a friend.

They will never ask you for your items.

If you look at the profile of someone claiming to be a Valve employee, and they don't have the Valve Employee badge, they are lying. Do not fall for this.


A common tactic with scammers is to send you to another site that they want you to deposit your items on so they can trade. People usually know about things like backpack.tf or marketplace.tf or scrap.tf, so they don't stop and think for a moment about one simple thing:

Why even bother?

If they're trading an item for another item, there is genuinely zero reason to do it anywhere but on Steam. If they try to get you to send your item somewhere else, they are either an idiot and not worth trading with in the first place, or a scammer, and should be avoided.


This one never made sense to me, but people seem to believe there's anything that can be verified and are worried about it. I don't understand this. There's no information anyone needs about an item that cannot be acquired by getting the item ID, which is easily acquired by right clicking on an item in your inventory and copying the link to the item.


This is a weird one even by my standards, but if someone starts calling you "bro" a lot when they first start talking to you, you should be on alert. For some reason beyond my comprehension, scammers love to call you bro. I don't get it, I don't know why this is, but 100% of the people who've called me bro have tried to scam me.


Whether you're seasoned in trading or new, you probably don't know the value of everything off the top of your head. If you don't know how to check the value of your items, here's how.

First, get your Steam id from the URL of your Steam profile (you should know how to get there but just in case, click here). Highlight the bit shown in the below image and copy it.


Then, go to https://backpack.tf/ and paste it here.


Hovering over items in your inventory here, you can view the stats. And in the item thumbnails, you can see the current value of the item.



If you really need this guide, there's a slim chance the following will apply to you but I figure you should know. A lot of unusuals in the upper-mid to god tier are really slow to update in value, and a few other items suffer this as well. 140 keys is the listed value of the item I'm using as an example.



However, the item is being sold for more, and there are buy orders for more too.



This isn't terribly uncommon. Bottom line, be aware of the current value of your items if you intend to trade.

I'm not going to go through all of the scams out there, but I will go through the ones I've had tried on me.


First of all, gambling is against Steam's API TOS. I don't know if promoting sites that violate this TOS can get you banned from Steam, but it should.

Second, they're not paying you. If they do pay you, it's with stolen items. It's either a phishing site, or a scam site where they'll just take all of the items people give them.




A few of my friends had their accounts compromised, presumably because they fell for this. I'll admit, it's very convincing, they've got a video and everything.

But it's fake.








The video is produced to make it look like they're really able to just change my password. Obviously, I'm still fine. The bottom line here is, why would they contact me if they can do this? I've got some good stuff on my account, and I've got loads of games. My account's worth at least like, a car. Why would they give me this chance when they can just take it?


I was attempting to trade with a legitimate trader, and this guy saw that I'd commented and impersonated two different people I was trying to trade with one after another. He did fool me, but I follow my rules of thumb up there, so I didn't get scammed.










I've gotten other scam attempts but they were just basic bait and switch nonsense, not worth going into detail about.

Above, I mentioned phishing. I've got a few tips for ID'ing these things.

First of all, watch out for page elements masquerading as a new window. They can even fake the URL to make it look legit this way.


As you can see, I can't drag the window outside of the page. Because it's not real. If i were to log in here, they would steal my information.

Make sure you're redirected to steamcommunity, and that the site info is correct as well. Be very careful about the spelling.

Scammers prey on your ignorance and complacency. You should always go into any new interaction slightly guarded, never just assume the person you're speaking to is going to be safe to talk to.

When you do spot a scam attempt, report them, block them, and then move on. Or make fun of them for a bit, it's good to blow off some steam imo.