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Archived Appeal Review for 76561198262209398 (WinnerOJD)

Discussion in 'Archived Appeals' started by WinnerOJD, Apr 25, 2021.

  1. WinnerOJD

    WinnerOJD Banned on SteamRep

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    Steam:
    STEAM_0:0:150971835
    Appeal Review Request
    Reminder: Appeal reviews are not appeals!

    Reason for Appeal Review: Other extenuating circumstance at admins' discretion. NOT USUALLY GRANTED!!!
    Past Appeal: https://forums.steamrep.com/threads...98-winnerojd-banned-by-sr.196357/#post-534324

    Steam profile: 76561198262209398 (WinnerOJD)

    Make your case:
    Hello there,

    I'm asking for my appeal to be rereviewed after as I honestly have absolutely no idea how I was "lying/lying by omission" (apart from a grammatical error I might have made) however I was advised to visit this appeal page by the same staff member who denied it. Regardless of that, I'd like someone to take a closer look into this situation and I think this is important to clarify: I am most definitely not 100% sure the same person who tried to blackmail me is the person I was accused of being as 1. it's extremely difficult to recognise a username full of numbers (especially with it being over 3 years ago) and 2. that was simply the "most likely scenario" according to a scrap.tf moderator I spoke with regarding this ban (however I think I mentioned this in my original report, though my wording may have been off).

    If an admin would be able to take another look into this and ask me any questions that might help to clarify that I'm not the user who I was accused of being I would be extremely grateful.

    In addition to this, after looking at the report threads of the the account that is apparently my alt, I can't see anything that mentions me at all so it might help to check if my ban was simply a mistake? My account also doesn't appear on their list of alternate accounts, which is why I thought this might be a possibility.

    Regardless of the outcome, thank you for reading and please tell me if there's any more information I can retrieve about my account and whatsoever as I can be completely transparent with anything related to my steam account (obviously not my password though).​

    Attached Files:

  2. You Are The One

    You Are The One SteamRep Admin

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    You only get one appeal, that is it, their are no second appeals. Further, an appeal review is NOT an appeal.
    To be very clear after reading the above policy, what exactly are you requesting an appeal review for?
  3. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    SteamRep Admin:
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    Lying by omission means you're intentionally leaving out details that you know would hurt your case, such as withholding an account when an admin asks you to list all of your alt accounts. In order to protect our methods and sources of information, so as to not build a roadmap that would help scammers figure out how to keep their alt accounts undetected from us, we are intentionally vague about what we do or don't know. As such, you may see admins use a generic "lying or lying by omission" term, which does not specifically state whether you said something we know is untrue, or you maliciously omitted something material to your case when we specifically asked about it. More on that for your case below though.
    What were you blackmailed for, why, and by whom? Think carefully before you answer that, don't just throw it out to a random profile because you'll be expected to back that statement up.
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    The numbers are a placeholder, which show up after Valve community bans an account and erases its name, usually when the account is impersonating someone. You can see the profile's name history from its Steam profile here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198328409680/namehistory
    Additionally, you can see some recorded name history, potentially going back even further, by clicking on the "Historical Data" link from its SteamRep profile, and scrolling through the menu that pops up. If you read through some of those names, that should help you remember.
    Scrap.tf is a Friend Community, but with all due respect to their staff, by and large they don't handle scam reports or appeals, as far as I know. Most of their scam-related bans happens on either Backpack.tf or Marketplace.tf, their sister websites; or they get imported from our database. I don't think specific information about your case has been widely disseminated, but if it were, Scrap.tf's community moderators would be unlikely to see it.
    By policy, we do not discuss how we discover alt accounts, but part of the process for re-evaluating them when contested involves asking very specific questions about one. You were asked several questions about it:
    And your answer to one or more of those questions was provably false according to our records. I cannot tell you any more specifically about that how we know you were lying, but I just checked the admin's response, as well as his internal notes. Lying in an appeal, or lying by omission, automatically disqualifies you from a favorable outcome, partly as a test of honesty. So unless you can explain yourself, or prove you weren't lying after all, I cannot authorize a second appeal.
    Alt investigations and bans happen separately, so you usually wouldn't find it there. Bans for alt accounts are always manually added by a human being. Mistakes happen, but those are quickly brought up and addressed during an appeal, with the notes and evidence re-scrutinized before even mentioning it. Per above, the admin handling your case asked specific questions about the alt, after having looked at the evidence on file, and you answered incorrectly. It was not a "simple mistake", because the admin's response would've been different otherwise, and there are notes indicating why the accounts are connected.
  4. WinnerOJD

    WinnerOJD Banned on SteamRep

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    It's new evidence. I found that the user was previously on my friends list so that could be a reason as to why I was banned as well.
  5. WinnerOJD

    WinnerOJD Banned on SteamRep

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    Steam:
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    Firstly thanks for taking so much time to look at my review and comment on things, I'd just like to say beforehand that I usually spend hours trying to form correctly my replies and posts due to dyslexia so if I do miss anything, it would be really helpful if you could tell me what I missed instead of simply closing the thread due to "lying by omission" though, I would really appreciate that. HOWEVER I appreciate you explaining the part about admins being intentionally vague as at first I misjudged and assumed they just didn't want to spend the time looking into it. I'm also not sure how to quote specific paragraphs so I really apologise if this starts to get messy.

    About the blackmail part. Before leaving tf2 and steam in general to get an xbox after receiving my steamrep ban (I didn't know what steamrep was at the time so my decision was based on the restrictions brought with the ban such as not being able to join certain servers my friends played etc), I can vividly remember being blackmailed by someone attempting to offer on an unusual smg I had obtained from trading. The person tried offering me an australium blutsauger in tf2 for it and after a while of him trying to convince me (including lying to me about wears on items saying my factory new unusual would gradually become battle scarred whereas his item will not, and offering for me to do the trade so I can "try out his item and see if I like it" with the option of trading back if I didn't. I doubt he would've traded back if I did.). I think a big part of this and the part which may have been my fault or that part I missed out when it was said I was lying by omission, is the fact that I was the one who approached him in the first place. I did not have much of an idea of values and simply thought all australium items were the most expensive in the game. He offered to help me to trade and said the first move would be to trade with him so I could get an item everybody wants. After I looked into it and suspected he was trying to rip me off, I told him I didn't want to do the deal and he blamed me for wasting his time, trying to guilt me of "scamming his time and trades" because I didn't do the trade in the end. He then told me I should enjoy my ban for wasting his time and sure enough, I ended up getting banned. With that said, I can't say 100% for sure that this is the same person I was accused of being or if they were linked to this, but what I said might explain something in my ban report (which I haven't seen) or provide some info you needed to know. I hope you can appreciate that it's very difficult to memorise such things as usernames from over 3 years ago, especially with me having had a lot more to do than just videogames (I was moving up to high school as well) but I believe that it's unlikely to have been someone else who caused me to get banned with there being very few trades I ever actually ended up making (almost all of them being from scrap.tf) and hence I didn't actually know anything more than the basics (which I'd think is why the person I mentioned tried to take advantage of me).

    As for me answering a question incorrectly at some point during my appeal, I want to clarify that after so much time I can't remember everything exactly 100% and I think I mentioned before that after going to a scrap tf moderator for help (which is actually how I found out steamrep and these forums), the end conclusion they made was that the reason I received the swagman's swatter hat from this user was that they purposely sent it from a banned account to me (I didn't manually accept either, as my steam settings were set to "automatically accept "gift" trades) in order to get me framed and banned. I don't know either if this is correct, but to me it seems like the most likely case other than an accidental mistake or some sort of fake evidence that I've never seen.

    ==========
    To be clear and so their is no miscommunication on your end, are you saying;
    (1) You do not know the user?
    (2) You never were friends with the user?
    (3) You deny sharing connections with this user?

    I can easily finish your appeal as soon as you answer all three questions, you have two weeks to do so or appeal will be concluded as-is.
    =========

    For this question, I think this might be a problem with how I read it (I'm very bad at understanding the wording of things). For number 1, the reason I claimed not to know the user is because I thought that meant actually knowing them in person or knowing them well online, because assuming they are the same person who blackmailed me, they were definitely not someone I would consider to know. However if this means simply knowing they exist or having spoken to them, then yes I did know them. For number 2 the reason I said no was because I didn't recognise the name full of numbers which I thought was their actual steam username, until you said this:

    ==========
    The numbers are a placeholder, which show up after Valve community bans an account and erases its name, usually when the account is impersonating someone. You can see the profile's name history from its Steam profile here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198328409680/namehistory
    Additionally, you can see some recorded name history, potentially going back even further, by clicking on the "Historical Data" link from its SteamRep profile, and scrolling through the menu that pops up. If you read through some of those names, that should help you remember.
    ==========

    After looking at their previous usernames, I definitely do recognise the name "Matthew Rhoten" so I'm quite sure they were on my friends list, which is another piece of evidence I'm able to give. With question 3 about sharing connections with the user, they were never an actual friend to me, despite them having been on my friends list. They weren't someone I remember conversating with about anything unrelated to the incident and other than that, I did not have any connections with them that I can even start to remember.

    I really hope that this here has answered your questions but I beg that you ask more questions if there's something you want me to try and explain more and I'll do my best, but once again memorising things from this long ago (at least for me) is very difficult. I also want to apologise again for my unnecessary frustration before where I accused staff of not reading appeals because you've quite clearly put a lot of time into reading and responding to this, so thank you.
  6. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    SteamRep Admin:
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    Let's be clear. We don't ban for having a scammer in your friends list, so there would have to be more than that for you to get linked to them and inherit their ban.

    So now you claim the user was in your friends list after all. Recall that in your original appeal, we did specifically ask if you were ever friends with this user, and you said never.
    By lying, you failed the test of honesty, so your appeal was denied for lying because we can't trust any further testimony from you about this account. This is not new evidence, because it was already known and documented in your original appeal.

    An example of new evidence (not applicable to this case, obviously) would be if you were banned for PayPal scamming, pleaded innocence in your appeal, were denied for lying about the scam, and then later on the same user who reported you was banned for fake reporting. That new evidence would clearly cast reasonable doubt about your original ban, and reinforce your original story, giving you grounds to dispute the admin's claim you were lying. In your case, you are admitting you lied, when we knew you were lying, but only after you were called out and rejected for it.
  7. WinnerOJD

    WinnerOJD Banned on SteamRep

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    Steam:
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    In your case, you are admitting you lied, when we knew you were lying, but only after you were called out and rejected for it.[/quote]
    That's because I had no idea that they were named anything other than the bunch of numbers until you told me how to check their different steam names. I also wasn't intentionally lying as by friend I assumed it meant having an actual relationship as a friend with the user, rather than simply being a steam friend, due to the fact that you could've checked if I was a friend with them or not so I guessed you were talking about the relationship type of friendship as in whether I knew them well and considered them to be close to me.
  8. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    SteamRep Admin:
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    So, your claim is that:
    1. You did not recognize the name because of how it was reset to a bunch of numbers.
    2. You were "just Steam friends" with this Matthew person. You never met him in person, nor were you ever on good terms, and that's what you meant when you said you were "never friends" in your original appeal.
    3. This Matthew person, who was in your friends list, was actually trying to blackmail you into trading your unusual when you were new.
    4. You did not read the appeal guide before submitting your case, and hence did not understand what we consider "lying or lying by omission" when you answered your original appeal incorrectly.
    Are all of these points correct? Is there anything else I'm missing that you'd like me to add, for consideration in your case? Do you have any other questions before I conclude your case with the information and evidence provided? Do you understand the terms of "lying and lying by omission" now?
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  9. WinnerOJD

    WinnerOJD Banned on SteamRep

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    Steam:
    STEAM_0:0:150971835
    Yes, all 4 of those points are correct and what I was trying to address (and I apologise for not doing so clearly). I don't think there's anything to add however if there is something else that I might have worded incorrectly or left too vague please tell me and I'll attempt to make it clearer. And Yes, I understand the terms of it now and admit I should've familiarised myself with them before jumping to conclusions.

    I don't have any questions right now so I'll leave it to you to conclude my case and do what you please.
  10. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    SteamRep Admin:
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    Ok then, I think I understand: While appealing, (point #2) you recognized this Matthew person as someone you had in your friends list, as the guy who tried to blackmail you; but then at the same time, also while posting that same reply in your appeal, (point #1) you did not recognize him because his display name in Steam was reset to random numbers by Steam Support.

    Points 1 and 2, both made by you, and then explicitly re-affirmed above when I directly asked, completely contradict eachother, so they can't be true at the same time. That means you're blatantly lying about one or the other, if not both.

    Addressing your 4 points:
    1. You stated in your appeal, above in this thread, and then confirmed in your latest reply here, that you did, in fact, recognize this account when asked. Even while still affirming you did not, and affirming you understand what we mean by being honest and not withholding anything. I even gave you a chance to amend your story above, but you re-affirmed those 4 points are exactly what happened. I can't go back and forth on this with you anymore, you are blatantly lying about either #1, #2, or both, so I can't take either one into account. We've already given you more time and attention than we normally offer in appeal reviews, but at this point you're just saying whatever you think I want to hear, off the top of your head, to see what sticks, which is wasting both our time and yours. You explicitly confirmed you understand what we're asking when we say "don't lie", so your "dyslexia" excuse can't bail you out here, and abusing that claim like you did is insulting and harmful to people who actually have that disability and need accommodations for it.
    2. Since you contradicted yourself between points #1 and #2, I can only conclude you're lying, so I cannot take either claim into account.
    3. This might have been relevant if (a) we tagged alts based on publicly submitted reports instead of manual investigation by a community admin, (b) you had some actual evidence to support your claim, and (c) you were not lying through your teeth throughout this appeal, calling the rest of your claims into question as you throw up whatever you think might stick. But since none of those apply, it's irrelevant to your case whether it actually happened or not (spoiler: it didn't).
    4. You are solely responsible for understanding our appeal policy when submitting your case. Failure to understand the policy - whether the part about honesty, or about repaying victims before you appeal - is not grounds to overturn an unfavorable outcome. I included this point just to make it clear that I heard everything you had to say, giving you one final chance to clarify or amend your story. But we can't simply let you backtrack with an "oops I didn't know what you meant by being honest" excuse. Your case is actually a poster child for why we have that policy, and I might even link it as an example next time someone doesn't understand why we reject appeals for lying and then don't allow re-appeals. You are stuck with that decision forever.
    I gave you a chance to prove you didn't lie, and even heard you out on all your other points in the process - which we normally wouldn't offer - but you lied again when "clarifying" your story. By policy, when you lie, we automatically reject your appeal, and you don't get another chance to come clean, ever. Instead of proving you didn't lie, or even didn't intend to lie, you just reinforced that claim by lying some more. Therefore, your appeal review is rejected, and you may not appeal again, nor may you use the appeal review process to petition for a re-appeal again.
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