Here at Sentinels we aren't too afraid at getting our hands dirty and going elbow deep into some of the burrows of the internet and doing what some may call "investigative journalism" but I feel it's an appropriate label as that is exactly what's happened over the last few days, lead by Sentinels researcher SirViolentDeath.

Earlier this week, myself and SirViolentDeath were in a call with each other discussing the profitability of fake games, which through this conversation, lead us to checking up on some old friends over on a website that some long time members may remember: Miped[techraptor.net], or the new name that the site is going under now, Mipped. For those not in the know, Miped/Mipped was a website that we uncovered all the way back in 2017, and we found that there was dodgey dealings happening on the forums, including bribery and even some mafia-esque intimidation happening, and the website has even gone on to dox some developers that have employed for some services but then not gone on to pay people or give what was promised. That's the short version of course, if you want to find out more, please do go and read the TechRaptor article.

Long story short, when we were looking through Mipped again, SVD found a thread on the website discussing another website by the name of Obzor. Now, I won't be linking to this website as I imagine it would get us into a lot of bother with Steam if they choose to clamp down on this. For full transparency, I did send an email to Steam a couple days ago to make them aware about both this website and the games and developers that we have found that are associated with it. I have yet to receive any word back from them, and I feel we have given them sufficient time before we went public on this, as I do feel it's very important. The whole existence of the site is basically an encouragement to violate Steam's Terms of Service, and while, of course, the purposes of this post is to condemn the website and its purpose, I still don't wish to be seen linking to it here on Steam.

Now, this website, in laymens terms is a website that developers go to to buy positive reviews for their games. I do admittedly admire the site in a way as they have so much security to try and stop people from gaining access to it and leaking the information on there. But let's do a deep dive into this website and what games and developers we have found are currently making use of this service.


Now, even to just get access to this website was a massive hurdle. SVD, thankfully was very up for the task, at this point there was him, myself, SidAlpha, Connor from MMO Fallout[mmofallout.com] in the call, along with Sentinels moderator Occular Malice dipping in and out while we were going through this website and we tried to help offer advice and navigation to SVD as to how to get into the website and what we needed to achieve when we got access. We expected we wouldn't have much time before the account we made got banned, so we needed to make it as thorough and efficient as possible.

We needed to submit phone numbers, emails, link a Steam account, be a resident in the Ruble zone amongst other things. So, 1 fake phone number generator app download, a fake email, a fake Steam account with a Russian bio, a Telegram account (more on that later) and a VPN later and we get access to the website, and oh my god, there was already a goldmine of information there.

The first thing that I noticed and was attracted to was that they had a set of rules for working through Obzor, and they look like this[imgur.com].

My personal highlights from their rules include:

Originally posted by Obzor:

A paid game must be purchased with money or Steam balance. It is prohibited to activate the game with a key or gift

This means that the reviews will always contribute to the aggregated score on the store page. The games are purchased by the users that are on the site and then they receive payouts after they have reviewed the games and done the required additional playtime, but we'll get into that later.

Originally posted by Obzor:

When writing a review, it is forbidden to check the "Game received for free" checkbox

I don't think I need to spell out what's wrong with this. Alot of the rules are basically saying to users "don't say you're getting paid for this"

Originally posted by Obzor:

The review should not contain the slightest hint that it was a paid review or that you did not play the game

So that was another thing, and, on Mipped, the website owner states that they encourage their users to make use of idling software[imgur.com] to up their game time to make the reviews look more genuine, which is what they're referring to when they say "don't indicate you didn't play the game" because, it seems common place for the users that are on this website not to play the games that they get.

Originally posted by Obzor:

You cannot tell anyone that you posted a paid review for the game

Originally posted by Obzor:

Everyone must maintain complete anonymity and confidentiality

Well that all changes today!

Let's continue!

So, once we had an account set up, we were greeted with this home page here[imgur.com].

This is the main page that's used by the mass majority of users on the website in that this is the home page for users that are there to give positive reviews. On the page, you can see the "orders". These are the fake review tasks. They include disclosing how much the game is, what the download size is, how long you need to play the game for before the review, how many words long the reviews need to be, and then also how long needs to be played after the review is posted. This in particular is to make it seem like the reviewer didn't just leave a positive review then skedaddle. It gives a false impression that they loved the game so much they went back and played more. It then also says how long is left until the order needs to be fulfilled upon receipt and also what the payment would be.

Often, if these are paid games, the "reviewer" is asked to initially pay the price upfront, however this gets reimbursed back to them with a small extra fee on top in exchange for the review, leading to a profit for the "reviewer". As shown in the top order which would pay out 568 rubles which was the initial asking price for the game, with an extra 80 rubles ontop for the price of the review. Which, to be clear, 80 rubles isn't alot. It's roughly £0.70 or $0.85. That's very cheap for a false review, but these reviewers we've found can write thousands of reviews, and some of them have done. It's important to note though, however, that not all of the reviews these users write are fake, as, the owner also advised on the Mipped forums that between the fake reviews, you should also write some genuine non-paid reviews[imgur.com], another means of trying to get people to go off the scent. Like I mentioned, the whole set away here is incredibly elaborate, and is done so that it's incredibly difficult to tell on a surface level that reviews are fake. An elaborate scheme, combined with cheap prices is what has meant a lot of developers have flocked here.

I also want to bring to your attention the numbers on the orders[imgur.com], as they went up to the 700's when we visited the website, which means hundreds of games on Steam have made use of this website.

In a smart move though, they don't give the name of the game initially. What then happens, we found out, is you need to submit an application to be considered, and then the application is sent to the developer/publisher of the game, and they need to approve of the user's application[imgur.com]. This was taken from the FAQ, where the developers/publishers are referred to as "the customers" and they refer to reviewers as "the Performers". With us all deciding no developer in their right mind would approve any applications with us having an empty profile with no games or reviews to speak of, SVD went ahead and wrote some reviews for games he genuinely liked to up the review count.

After a lengthy wait, with some of us even giving up hope that we would receive any applications at all, I got a message after we concluded our initial meeting to talk about the site from SVD to tell us we had our first trickle of offers come in.

The golden nugget of these offers was the fact that they named and shamed the games in question that were using the website. Now, unfortunately, the website seemed to notice quite quickly that we were up to something suspicious, and about 24 hours after we opened our account, it got banned for suspicious activity, but it did result in us obtaining 4 games and 4 different developers that are making use of this website and employing people to write false positive reviews. Below are the games we have found to be guilty of manipulating reviews through employing Obzor:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2757630/Lonely_Knight__Idle_Roguelike_RPG/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2515210/SKIBIDI_BACKROOMS/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1442450/Monsters_Domain/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2203070/Dragonheir_Silent_Gods/

And, in a means of luck for us, as we received a fifth offer, unfortunately, our account got banned, which means we initially couldn't see what this mystery fifth game was. However, you remember that Telegram account I mentioned about earlier that had to be made? Well, that Telegram account's purpose was to enable an Obzor bot to have push notifications when we were running out of time to complete a fake review. This Telegram bot, despite our account being banned, fed us an update reminding us we still had to write a fake positive review for:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/866510/AnyWay/

All of the evidence of these game offers are included in this Imgur album[imgur.com].

Similarly, as I drew attention to the order numbers before of the initial tasks, I want to draw your attention to the order numbers on our end from after we received offers[imgur.com]. While there was review requests within the hundreds, our last order number before our account ban was 6918. That means, we can insinuate that thousands of fake positive reviews have been written through offers made through this site.

And the owner is on Mipped, saying that it's okay to do this if nobody finds out, and that nobody lets Valve know what it is that they're up to[imgur.com]. I'm afraid it's too late for that now.

The examples we showcase, such as SKIBIDI BACKROOMS, it sits at 71% mostly positive, how much of that was the helping of fake reviews. It is 2 points off from a mixed review aggregation, with some negative reviews even alleging it's a bitcoin miner[imgur.com]. A similar story (minus the crypto miner claims) can be said about !Anyway! Its current aggregation also sits at 71%, how much of this was helped by fake reviews? Was this potentially done to try and quash some of those negative reviews? That seems at least somewhat to be the case behind Monsters Domain. A myriad of negative reviews at launch, now propped up with a 44% mixed rating, 5 points off being mostly negative. And then you spot reviews like this, 4 hours in-game, spent time in the game before and after the review, and they have 0 achievements[imgur.com], not even getting the completed combat training achievement that over 75% of players have. But yet they seem to have such a good idea about the game's quality.

Lonely Knight is arguably even more blatant when we put what we know to the test, as most of the front page positive reviews it has are fake, Mihailovich, Limon[archive.is], Igores07 and more all writing fake reviews. There are commonalities that can be found when comparing games they have reviewed as well, these guys review the same games as each other. Why? Because they receive the same offers. These are only broken up by anomalies that, like we mentioned earlier, the owner recommends writing genuine reviews between fake reviews to make these harder to track, but even that can still show patterns of behaviour.

I have started to circulate this information to others to encourage them to talk about it more, but I do also encourage you all to share this as much as is possible. We've now got the understanding that through this website thousands of offers have been made to write fake positive reviews for hundreds of games on Steam. This is major. It damages consumer trust. These schemes are very elaborate and have been designed to be tricky to spot, but I hope with what we have presented here, there is enough to spread a wider discussion, and that people are aware of what we need to be watchful of, and I strongly implore Valve that action needs to be taken against the accounts that are found to be posting these reviews, and for the game developers that employ these services.

Please please please, share this, show this to your communities, share this to potential buyers of these games to warn them of what these developers are doing so that unsuspecting buyers don't go off a paid undisclosed review to influence their purchase.

DISCLAIMER: NO FAKE POSITIVE REVIEWS WERE WRITTEN FROM OUR DUMMY ACCOUNT WE CREATED FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS ARTICLE. WE MERELY COLLECTED OFFERS AND DIDN'T RESPOND TO THEM FOR THE PURPOSES OF COLLATING A GAMES LIST OF THOSE THAT ARE USING THE SITE.

Special thanks to our patrons old_Navy_twidget, Stefan and Caff for their continued support!

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