Botnet being used to boost certain games

[SnaKe7X]

First of all, sorry if this isn’t the right place for this, but I noticed a recent spike in players for Artifact, so I decided to check out the reviews. I saw several copy pasted negative reviews on the page. Now, I don’t really care much about those negative reviews since I don’t play the game, but it made me curious, so I checked the user profiles behind them. All of them had random game reviews posted after only an hour of gameplay. Two games were almost always present: Delta Force and The Finals, both receiving positive reviews. I mean, at that point, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on, right?

[76561199540158642]

those copy and paste reviews are all over steam, you can't really believe steams review system any more, its been this way for a few years now and is only getting worse, back in 2019 it was around 40k bots, today its around 200k bots, keep an eye out when you see any steam game with 100k or 200k Likes, beware its most certain fraud.

[SnaKe7X]

Yeah, I noticed they use several F2P games to post fake reviews and disguise their real objective. In this case, I have a hunch that it’s Delta Force, since their publisher is owned by Tencent.

[YashimaZuke]

You still can see legit Steam reviews but the only factors are an active Profile and multiple hours of gameplay of that game but yeah this is actually sad to see.

[Placenta Salad]

These botnets connect to a variety of video games beyond just Artifact. You can see them even joining groups for Steam trading cards and groups like "Girl Gamers" where the first few dozen or so pages of the members list will show nothing but bots with similar usernames, profile design, and same games played where Artifact is on that list for botting. They join these Steam groups to try and find people whose accounts can be phished to then add to that botnet or to try and steal inventory items from.

The bots belong to an entire network of scammers who have made a career out of idling and scamming in games that offer Steam drops, particularly games where drops can be very valuable like Counter-Strike 2.

[SnaKe7X]

interesting, at the very least, thanks to them using artifact today, maybe a huge bunch on them can be identified easily and deleted, i know is almost futile to try and get rid of them, but at the very least valve should do something

[Princess Luna]

So what do we do now?