How to fight sellers of offline Steam account access?

[Krzeszny]

Some account sellers sell access to games in Steam's offline mode. Offline access is much cheaper than selling a full account. If I bought access, can I report the login & password (if yes, where specifically?) to get that account locked?

I hate the idea that my favourite game is being sold for about $1 by some... pirates? Is this called piracy? The sale of account assess is not against the TOS of the website it's posted on.

EDIT: was too long

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

You can report the account as a rented out account through the report function on the profile page.

[Krzeszny]

Ok, thanks.
It makes my think why Valve don't (or do they?) catch pirates based on account activity. They too lose money because of it.

[Krzeszny]

Originally posted by Theblaze:

Originally posted by Corsac Fox (Krzeszny):

Ok, thanks.
It makes my think why Valve don't (or do they?) catch pirates based on account activity. They too lose money because of it.

Because it's literally impossible to check ~10m accounts on their own?. If you can provide evidence of someone renting, selling or buying accounts, you're free to report the shared account(s).

Of course, I'm not suggesting manually checking accounts! Algorithms!
They could create an algorithm based on:
-the number and frequency of new IP addresses logging in from new computers (not the same computers, so it's not triggered by the use of VPN)
-the number of different countries these IPs come from - who has dozens of family members on all continents, using the same Steam account?
-whether it's in family mode (it locks out the ability to remove games or change the account settings)
-when new users log in, they don't input the SteamGuard code immediately, as the users don't have the access to it at first
-the account is mostly used in offline mode, and logged into/logged out of very often because it's most likely not the primary account of the buyer

Example: that seller's most popular sale (excluding other platforms than Steam, which get hundreds of buys) is an account with House Flipper + Garden Flipper. 50 sales. That means 50 new logins from new IPs on an account with family mode enabled, and potentially 50 users who have at least at one point used offline mode, and some users who log in and out very often. I don't think it would be that hard to make an algorithm that displays accounts sorted by popularity, for manual review and possible bans.

The account I'm going to report had 13 sales. That's still some lost revenue lost compared to the cost of $1 per account. And it's going to be more and more.

It's like with Steam games activated through VPN because in some countries they're much cheaper than in other ones. Pretty easy to track down and then review manually. Who would travel to Russia to activate a single gift/key and then come back to Europe within a day? Within an hour? Within A FEW MINUTES? Has anyone ever received a Steam gift in their home country and went to another country/continent to activate it? Nobody does that.

This is just an idea. Criticise it all you want.

[Zekiran]

IPs don't work for any of that in any way that would be useful.

[Krzeszny]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

IPs don't work for any of that in any way that would be useful.

I thought that they show the location of the ISP. But if they don't, Valve could check the language or regional settings of different accounts used on the same computer, except for English. For example, I live in Poland but I mostly use English. Would that be spying? I don't know. Just an idea.

[AbhishekPapanna]

Originally posted by Krzeszny:

Originally posted by Zekiran:

IPs don't work for any of that in any way that would be useful.

I thought that they show the location of the ISP. But if they don't, Valve could check the language or regional settings of different accounts used on the same computer, except for English. For example, I live in Poland but I mostly use English. Would that be spying? I don't know. Just an idea.

You see the problem with trying to identify fraud, don't you? It's not simply about adding a bot, say if the bot malfunctions, millions of legitimate users might get affected.

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This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.