About using Market Manipulated Items on trading Sites

Hey,

im running some Tradebots and a trading website.

I woke up half an hour ago, just to see that all items on the website got traded for a couple dozen Sawed-Off Irradiated Alert BS (Counterstrike). Lost close to 800 bucks, got pwned. My heart may be filled with anger but Im trying to write this as calm and descriptive as possible, forgive me if something sounds a little too energetic =)

As you can see on the market site someone heavily manipulated the prices, effectively raising average/median price of the last week from a couple cents to a couple dozen dollar.

Im asking myself now if there's anything to raise awareness of the guy abusing this a.k.a. is this reportable?

I probably know that this is like tilting at windmills, since this isnt a scam in general sense but ... don't know.. a meta-scam(?) and you could always say that it's my own fault for not checking. But, whoever worked with items over steamapi (or any service offering a price database) knows that this is not sufficiently possible. I put days into coding checks for these specific cases, checking for items sold per day, comparing prices over days, etc., etc. but you cant fully cover it without affecting items, that have a "legit price" but are just a little swingy. Again a Don Quijotian innuendo, fighting this is a nice attempt but in the end worthless, you cant actively stop this, only reactivly by checking 6200+ items per hand per day.

Aite, enough rambling on my side. As said, this may not be a classic scam, but it feels like one. Someone manipulates the market with intend to defraud and even if the person abusing the manipulated items isnt the one who manipulated them, he or she are still using those in an abusive manner.

Regards,

Bob

Well, sadly there is no way you can proof that someone did this, and it really isn't a classical scam, though a better way you should had that if an item price is rapid pidly increasing, you need to manually check and approve the new price, every website will be exploited if you let people do it

Hey, yeah as said in OP, I too think that it's not a classical scam. But as the scene evolves, these things evolve aswell and even if this is not the time to think about classifying market manipulation / use of those items or general ... "website-fraud" (meh I dont have a better word, but you get what I mean), sooner or later the issue will arise. The number of market manipulated items is steadily rising and my bet is that this straight up correlates with the amount of websites which include automated trading, that pop up. May it be trading, betting or gambling websites.

Think I covered the "should do" part my OP, although I admit that the situation proves that - even if most of my coding effort goes into security and preventing these kinds of trobules- I havent done enough.

But to get at the point of proving:

I got the persons profile, I commented on it as chill as possible, he or she answered on my profile comments, apologizing for what he did and putting up some brother-in-hopsital story (cropped and censored pic attached. Got the full&uncropped on my pc incase I get a go for the report).

I got the trade-history of my bot, I got evidence that he tried to pull the same on my non-website tradebots for my knifes and last but not least I got the detailed sql logs of him requesting and doing the trades, which arent proving much on their own but may be helpful, if viewed in the bigger picture.



ps: I had a look at his profile before he went private. If he needs to save his brother, he should've thought about selling his lore and or high tier knifes first =)

I don't think there is anything you can do except securing your website, he didn't technically scam anything

Aite no harsh feelings, as said, I didnt have much hope to begin with, as I myself dont see that as a real scam. It's like sharking, only a bit more a✿✿✿✿✿✿-ish.

Just wanted to make sure before going at him, wish me luck

Cheers!

It's like gimmicky stock markets (by micro crashes and pushups), but there is an authority overseeing it. For us it is impossible to oversee, and we've had the stance for a very long time that we will not set prices on items in whatever form, for nobody will follow it, (imagine the boatload of reports if we would... :S ).

There is no way for us to even check whom did so and what happened exactly and the involvement of those.

Various sites have cool down periods or manual checks if it goes outside a certain "band" of prices within certain periods. Also, if you bought the items for x, you should implement that items get sold for x+y, where y is the margin you require, and make it a manual confirm.

Any item with low quantity is susceptible for this. Huge quantity and fast buying/selling of them it won't work on really.

/edit: Also, any "the brother did it" / "sad story" or w/e is no excuse anyhow imo.