questions about impersonators, scammers, girl pretenders, and bot accounts

[Albert Einstein]

Dear Valve / Steam Support,

I highly appreciate your work and the Steam community (in its entirety), and in the past 15+ years I made a lot of friends and tried a large variety of games on Steam.

In the past year (or few years), I observed a shocking increase in the number of impersonating user accounts and bot accounts.

1. Impersonators/girl pretenders who promise to send / sell (sexual or sexually suggestive) images. There are 10000s of such accounts and they're pretty active in steam groups. Furthermore, they create their own little scam paradise (steam groups) which they even moderate.
   
   
2. Bot accounts which send viruses (scam website links) or spam the comment sections in Steam groups. They even join the group chats and send CS GO scam links with the purpose to steal (hijack) accounts. "As soon as" one bot is banned by the group admins, another bot joins.

The entire moderating toolset is very limited: For example if I know all the bots have the name Alice<3 , why can't I set up a filter? Why can't I issue a ban based on Steam/community id before they even join?

I try to report those accounts and also include google image search results (about the impersonators), and the names of the persons on the images (they can often be found easily).
When it's relevant, I include steam chats (private chats), because those users are even proud of what they are doing.

Unfortunately, the result of my reports (=the action taken on my reports) is questionable, and it seems to be inefficient. In several cases, scammers who steal unbelievably expensive CS GO knives (and other items) just get a warning or a temporary ban.

People who spam pornographic images (and videos, links) in group chats don't even get a warning, and they are allowed to do this. Several groups are unmoderated, as I mentioned, the scammers themselves set up groups and advertise them.

I personally think that warnings - in these above cases - are completely useless and ineffective.

Even if those users get a permanent ban, the next day they continue to do the same thing on another, new account (they don't even choose a new name, they literally set up the same account again and again).

My questions:

1. What kind of evidence do Steam support require to efficiently handle these problems, and how/where can I send it? In a regular user report, I can't even attach an image.
   
   
2. In the case of impersonating accounts, is it enough to provide the name of the pornstars (and reverse image search results), or these users are allowed to sell fake images?
   
   
3. In several cases, google simply can't find the images, but the user changes his profile photo every day, and it can be clearly seen that the photos are not the same girl (one is chinese, another is a european, etc.). Can action be taken on these obvious pretenders? They sell fake images, as I mentioned. They beg for gift cards, gift games while looking for a "new husband".
   
   
4. Aren't the group chats checked/monitored by Steam support? What happens if the moderators don't care about the Steam online conduct at all ( https://store.steampowered.com/online_conduct/ ) ?
   
   
5. What about those users who set up fake instagram, onlyfans accounts and advertise their links (in steam profile description, infobox, etc) ? The impersonators are really good at outplaying the rules.
   In these cases, I went as far as reporting them on every platform where they created an account.
   
   
6. As steam is not an exclusively 18+ platform, why are these users allowed to spam sexual comments in open (public) groups? "add me and buy my content" , "I'm very lewd" , "I sell cheap content here and there. feel free to add me"

The relevant sections from the Steam online conduct:
Engage in unlawful activity
Upload or post illegal or inappropriate content
Violate others’ personal rights
Engage in commercial activity

------------

All in all, I have a feeling that the moderation is slow and inefficient. And while it takes 5 minutes for them to create a new account and continue their activity, it takes hours for me to gather and organize google image search results and find out the names of pornstars which then I can send to support.
As a result, it's a lot harder for me to report the problems compared to creating a new account for those problematic users.

I hope, and really hope that I'm alone with my bad experience.

[HikariLight]

Spamming a wall of text won't help

[Albert Einstein]

Originally posted by HikariLight:

Spamming a wall of text won't help

Unfortunately, yesterday I got some errors while creating this post. It didn't appear at all despite literally waiting for hours. Later in my comment history I also saw this: This item was moved or deleted.

You can imagine how surprised I was to see my posts (8 times repeated) this morning.

Anyway, I deleted the spam (duplicated posts), and this is the only one remaning. I'm really sorry once again.

[Pierce Dalton]

Valve doesn't care about such things. The more users, the better for their stats.

[Anonymous Helper]

Originally posted by Obi Bellen:

My questions:
What kind of evidence do Steam support require to efficiently handle these problems, and how/where can I send it? In a regular user report, I can't even attach an image.

Nothing you can send qualifies. Steam Support solely relies on their own records on Steam. Only thing you can do is make a report and write what you think the reported account did. If it happened outside of Steam, you need to report it to the service it happened to. Steam Support can do nothing about what happens on 3rd party sites.

Originally posted by Obi Bellen:

Aren't the group chats checked/monitored by Steam support? What happens if the moderators don't care about the Steam online conduct at all ( https://store.steampowered.com/online_conduct/ ) ?

Steam Support / Steam Moderators don't actively monitor anything. They act solely on reports. If something is reported it will be looked into when they get to it in the queue (can take days). If something isn't reported nothing will be done about it.

[Albert Einstein]

Originally posted by Anonymous Helper:

Nothing you can send qualifies. Steam Support solely relies on their own records on Steam. Only thing you can do is make a report and write what you think the reported account did. If it happened outside of Steam, you need to report it to the service it happened to. Steam Support can do nothing about what happens on 3rd party sites.

Almost all the evidence is available for Steam support (through their "own records"). Just think about user profile descriptions, infoboxes. profile picture, artworks, user comments (the impersonators often beg for gifts, "donations"). This is all useful information for Steam support to take action on an account.

A few days ago, I reported a fake person's Steam account whose entire profile name is just a paypal link. They're still not removing the profile name.

I know they can't do anything about what happens on 3rd party websites, but the issues I report happen on Steam. And those users very often have alternative accounts, so Steam support should look into that too. (A lot of users register (or buy) throwable 5$ accounts for their scam purposes.)

[H4CK3R MAN]

I think this is an issue aswell. there's a few accounts belonging to some of the old csgo case opening sites with inventories worth tens of thousands being impersonated constantly. Yet Support is extremely slow in banning these impersonators. And despite it being extremely obvious that they are impersonating since they state on their own account that they don't have any other accounts while linking to the inventory of the impersonated account(s), nothing is done when they are getting reported for impersonating

[LoveAndPeace]

dude if you think anything will get better on steam.. i have news for you.
steam is a file server with a forum and thats all there is to it.
theres no money in fixing anything or anyone so it's ignored much like 90% of support cases being replied to as if robots read what you typed.

[Albert Einstein]

Originally posted by LegionKIN:

dude if you think anything will get better on steam.. i have news for you.
steam is a file server with a forum and thats all there is to it.
theres no money in fixing anything or anyone so it's ignored much like 90% of support cases being replied to as if robots read what you typed.

One of the purposes of this thread is to share our experiences and to try to help each other.
So if you have anything to add, anything constructive, please do so anytime.

[Crazy Tiger]

One has to keep in mind that just because one thinks that things aren't ok, Steam Support can decide differently. They can even decide to ignore things. And ultimately, their say goes.

[RSebire]

Valve is shameless.
No point asking for answers.
You wont get any.
They will probably just ban you instead...