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Transaction verifications on Paypal by transaction ID's. That it can be verified via a page on PP that transaction ID X happened on day Y, for the amount of Z, between A and B (emails), A being sender, B being receiver. Either by a direct page (think thats unadvisable for PP) or the owner of the paypal addresses allowing a 3rd account to verify wether a transaction did or didn't happen.

Scammer A didn't pay to B, does some photoshopping and posts pictures of "payment" to B. As the Transaction ID is known, as well as the emails, it should be easy to verify a payment did occur or not on a date.

I purposedly didn't ask for steam stuff, for that won't be given anyways by Valve. But the above would be feasible for either party could be give permission to review a single transaction. And if it doesn't exist, they could still "allow" the check on the ID vs their account... which would show that such transaction didn't occur.

Well, I was merely playing hypothetical, just to kind of give kind of something to think about. If you were talking within Steam, would you say public trading histories would be most useful?

I agree, there should be some kind of receipt record / better way of fact checking on Paypal though.

Any such history would be subject to privacy settings on steam. And I think valve intentionally only let it show to the owner of the account. It would have been easy for them to make it public available if they wanted to. But I think they need also to listen to their lawyers/privacy policies etc.

And item history isn't the big deal imo. There 2 ways to work it out: by going to the original owner, and going to the next found owner of the item and ask them whom they traded it from, and work your way back. That that is a lot of work, sure, but its almost not needed to do.

Maybe something simular as above I proposed: that we can verify a individual trade.

Valve is bound by laws and privacy etc. They cannot just publicly share things without problems. As services must be developed by them and their way of organization... They also cannot directly cooperate with SR. This is the reason why SR only rarely contacts them with a excessive case/ Community problem, we don't get information from Valve outside provided services to everybody. Also we don't want to burden them with loads, and get ignored so only really important stuff is passed on occasion.

Even though I'm not anything more than a humble forum mod over on OP, I could still say that universal access to either chat or trade history for the SR admins would massively help SR achieve it's goals.

If someone is doing some big time scamming, they may or may not get marked earlier. It really depends on the severity of the situation.

If I could see inventory history on anyone, it would be incredibly easy to catch people who trade with scammers and to verify a report.

lol, chat valve doesn't store that afaik. They could but thats not really interesting either. it would require a lot of storage, and its not remotely interesting. If they would implement such, it would be a local copy. and as all local copies would be its subject to tampering.

I don't believe that they keep chat logs, but, I interpreted the "or otherwise" as meaning currently, or not currently existing. My main logic behind this was simply that, if Valve were to keep logs, which SR had access to, you would no longer need to turn down reports for lacking screenshots of chat, and only having transcripts. Simply search the transcript, and you'll know instantly if it's legitimate or not.

It was a very open ended question, very much open to interpretation

I think that if item trade history was available on all profiles to be viewed by others it would help a lot. I know a lot of the sharks and hustlers would object to that and I hustle a lot but I would gladly allow ANYONE to see ANY of my trades (they are AFTER the fact). The fact of the matter is that if this was available then MANY MANY MANY scammers would have a VERY hard time "laundering" their items. Also, although profiles can be kept private I wish trading history would not.

Hello,

I am kinda newcomer and i need some clarification from you because your actions can affect my gameplay. Tday I got a message from a player marked as a scammer. We havent traded yet but we are supposed to do it later - the trade is going to be fair and is concerning low value items. And here goes the question - can i be warned for trading with such person?

Please read SteamRep FAQ if you want to know more.

I'm just wondering how it works as i feel that this community lacks the sense of freedom and It limits the players who even didn't agree with any ToS. Ofc there is steam ToS and its fine with my but why am I made by you to obey the rules of this system? I can understand the logical argument standing for preventing scams but still i can't understand how it works that normal and fair trading (not laundering) with a person marked scammer can make us get a scammer tag too -_- It looks like kind of collective punishment humm...

I assume your vision would be different if you got scammed out of all your items and saw that everyone thinks of it as "ok" to buy those from the scammer...

Trading with people marked as scammers is not recommended because the items could come from a scam, hijack or other deceptive and shady trading practices.

I guess so. But still this only proves that I pay for your mistakes Not boasting but I have played tons of MMORPGs and traded characters/items many times via the auction systems - I experienced not a single scam nor was my mmo acc hacked. Therefore I can't rly complain about scammers because 90% of scamms could be avoided. The way you approach the problem is prohibition+penality. The history saw this and now we know what the outcome can be. Anyway, I was just asking. Probably not going to take a risk for a mere 0.44 item (lawl) but still I claim that this holy-war is nothing but bullsh*t.

Best,

Edit:
@Black Adder
Yup and the pope is reptilian.

Ohh i forgot, still thanks for your answers - I appreciate your help folks.

The problems are a bit complex, but come in base to:
- Laundering items by either swapping them for clean ones he can move to a clean alt to get his profit legit.
- Items could have been hijacked items. Problem with those is that those can be revoked by steam support.
- Duplication, value downfall of items due that the items in question where duplicated to the hijack victim by steam support. You bought then for full price a item, meanwhile duplicates are made and those are worth less.
- Items traced to you, getting "in the picture" of a possible scammer alt.
- Laundering items can get up in volume and start to be objectionable by a lot of ppl. For the scammer those items are free, so anything he gets in return is pure profit, therefore he's not bound to get profit vs the price paid in trading, and can offer those items largely discounted to his launderer, who is then a accomplice.

One note tho, SR doesn't look at total traded value (that might be in multiple trades) below a bill's hat or any unusual involved per scammer.

I have a question if any mods don't mind answering it.

If you have just bought/traded an unusual which has one or more scammers in the item history, is there any negative effects for the current owner? I'm pretty sure this is a very common case for most unusual trading as I hardly see any unusual with no scammer's trade history in it.

Not really, unless the unusual last owner was a scammer by the time it was acquired by the user (Which means that he bought it from a marked scammer)

Add me to the list you whores.