Carder, an idea on how to prevent it

After viewing multiple threads regarding this, i think theres a quite easy solution on Valves end on how to fix it. I'm posting this here first because i was courious on how you guys take this idea. So from what i could tell, a carder is somebody that gets a credit card by illegal means and then uses that card to purchase thousands of keys from the community market or valve. That user then sells the keys for cheeper than normal and it causes a lot of trouble for the person that purchased the keys.

A way i figured that could be done to fix this is another level of verification when purchasing items. I'm not sure how long the person that stole the credit card has access to the card after he stole it, but i assume it really cant be to long. So if you go to valve to purchase keys it should have some sort of phone verification or possibly a 4 digit pin that the user created. Its like creating a G-Mail account where you need to input a phone number sometimes in order to create an account.

Another idea can be a waite peroid from when you linked the credit card to your steam account to when you can start purchasing items with the card. Just like that peroid of time you have to waite for the Steam Guard to be activated. I'm not sure if im grasping how carders work correctly, but they, i assume link the card to a steam account and then go on purchasing the keys and such.

All in all, its just a matter of verification when purchasing items, it may take people a few minutes longer to use cash to make trades, but it would end up being a lot safer i think. Again, i may not be 100% clear on how the carder's operate and work, so if i have any miss information, i would hope somebody could clear it up for me. I pitched this to you and i'm hoping to also pitch this to valve.

These are only my speculations on how the problem may be solved. I would also enjoy hearing others idea on this problem and how to have a fix for it. I'm sorry if im not aloud to post topics like this at SR, i didint see anything aginst it in the rules, if so please remove this topic. Thank you for taking your time to read this.

Unfortunately the ideas you proposed would probably more trouble than they're worth and they would be very time consuming for users and valve.

Unfortunately that would make the store very annoying to use and I'm not sure a lot of people would actually be willing to do that - also if carder is the first person to use the card it's not very helpful

Again, it's quite annoying since everytime you wanted to make a new alt with TF2 premium or even the first time a normal person buys a game they have to wait a month or so; not convenient and valve would lose some business

This is an interesting subject, but I think Valve must have thought about ideas like this already, and they have decided not to change their policy, so far. I'll suggest a new idea that they may not have considered...

Valve have access to far more data than us, so they can see how much money they are losing from carding, and compare that with the money they could lose with tighter restrictions.

Valve already have some rules in place which appear designed to prevent carding. They obviously aren't stopping it, though they make it more difficult.

Valve's rules are really unclear. They never seem to be stated clearly all in the same place, and sometimes they even contradict each other in different places. It's often not clear which of Valve's store(s) the rules are referring to. But, anyway, as far as I can figure it out, these are the rules:

• If an account has Trusted Status, according to Valve, then it can purchase things in the store and trade them immediately.
• If an account has does not have Trusted Status then it cannot purchase keys and then trade them immediately. It has to wait 3 days. This 3 day delay is transferred to any item obtained from a crate with they key. Perhaps this rule applies to some other items as well.
• An account gets Trusted Status 30 days after its first purchase from a Valve Store (and loses Trusted status if no purchase is made for 1 year)
• (Also, Steam Guard prevents an account from trading until its linked email address has been verified for 14 days).

There do seem to be exceptions to these rules sometimes, maybe for older accounts or for certain types of purchase which are allowed to ignore the rules? Reference: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/massive-increase-in-valve-trade-ban.23698/page-2#post-73887

Economics of carding

A stolen credit card number (with holder's personal information) costs $10, maybe less, depending on region, credit limit, etc. If a carder buys $200 worth of keys on a card, then they come out with about $70-$80 profit. Subtract a dollar or two for other expenses like access to an IP on a botnet, and purchasing the hijacked Steam account, plus the time used. That's still a huge profit margin. So Valve would need to cut the carders' success rate dramatically to make most of them stop.

Valve's strategy

We don't know what's happening behind the scenes, but maybe Valve has now decided to attack carders by throwing the problem back onto people who trade with carders. So you see this increase in trade bans.

TBH, If this is what they're doing then I don't disagree with this approach, but the way Valve implemented it has been a mess because there's been no communication. People are getting banned for doing stuff that they had assumed was OK - but now it's suddenly not OK. Other guilty people still seem to avoid getting banned by using ridiculously obvious workarounds which prevent Valve from detecting them. And now people are complaining that account rollbacks are inconsistent and they've lost stuff, because they traded an item to someone who paid them with keys that were originally carded.

Solving the problem by tagging keys?

I think that Valve's strategy of pushing the task of carded keys detection out to the player base is the right idea. However, Valve is doing it in totally the wrong way, because they are not sharing information with players.

The best alternative approach is for Valve to give all keys a 'Payment Not Verified' tag that is not removed until Valve is confident that the payment isn't going to be revoked. The tag would have to be transferred to any item obtained from a crate using a tagged key (compare this to the transferable 3 day trading restriction mentioned above). And it would probably also need to be applied to some other store-purchased currency items, like MvM tickets and high-priced new items.

If Valve later discovered a key was carded, they would simply delete it from the system. This would be disastrous for the unfortunate person who owned the key(s) at that time, but unlike the present situation, they knew they were taking a risk, because the key was tagged as unverified. So, there would be no trade bans and trade locks to make lots of users angry, no difficult multiple account rollbacks (though obviously Valve would still deal with the original carders).

So people could still trade with risky keys, but they would know the risk, and they would naturally tend to avoid them unless they came from a reputable source. In this way, Valve can give their difficult fraud-detection problem to the market of millions of players, instead of a few overworked people in Bellevue.

Tagged keys would trade at a much lower price than verified keys, until the tag was removed. Tagged keys would tend to accumulate in the hands of people who are good at detecting carders, who would wait to resell them when the tag was removed. Traders who kept selling keys which got revoked later would be shunned, and maybe even get a scammer tag here, especially if they had lied about the source.

That last topic that you posted regarding the tagging, that's a really good and intresting idea i think. The problem would be how does valve know when to change it from tagged to like verified? Also, another problem is if people use the cards to purchase directly from other players instead of just the store and such, that could also result in problems. I do very much like the idea of tagging keys though

They wouldn't know for sure, unless the payment method was something irreversible, because chargebacks can occur 4-6 months after payment, even longer in some cases. But if stolen credit cards are the biggest source of fraudulent purchases, then they usually get detected quite quickly, within a week or two, I believe.

Valve would have to change the keys' status to verified when they think the risk of the money vanishing is low enough to be accepted. It could simply be a fixed time limit, like 2 weeks, but it would work much better if it was a variable period of time that depended on Valve's calculation of the risk in each case. That can be based on factors like the purchasing account's location, recent account activity, payment method, and so on (the same kind of methods that I guess they already use to detect fraud).

Yea i would love to see valve put a 2 weeks NON trading on any item coming from the shop no matter how old your account are tbh and no matter when you did last buy, true it would make certain things harder but it would get rid of a lot of problems aswell

guys in all reality, they cant stop credit cards from being used immediately. very very very small percentage of money spent on steam is actually trade related. they are a game reseller primarily. They make their money their. If they blocked all the impulsive buyers their stock will plummet. Ultimately they have to do something that wont affect the non-traders. So their hands are tied on 99 of 100 strategies discussed since the beginning of trading days and the mannconomy.