Declined Report: 76561197969089707 - ([DOTA2] Dota2 Items)

Scam Report

Report Type: [Money] PayPal scam or scam attempt
Virtual item type involved: [DOTA2] Dota2 Items

Accused profile: 76561197969089707

Victim profile: 76561198005220379

What happened? Description:

Scammer contacted me after I listed my Treasure of the Crimson Witness 2018 on the marketplace. Asked me if I was interested in selling and when I said I'm in no rush he offered to pay considerably more than current market value for the Treasures (I have 2 in total). Steamrep checks came up clean and his profile appeared to have a reasonable history tied to it (though on closer inspection most of his positive feedback in profile is from the last 2 months, the majority on December 8th). As I was checking into this trader, I was contacted by another offering slightly more for the same item, but who was immediately flagged on Steamrep as a scammer. At the time I didn't think about it, but this was likely an accomplice because he asked if I had any other offers and reported this other trader as a scammer to me while I was busy looking into it myself. He didn't want to use a middleman, which was red flag number 1. Insisted he has a verified Paypal account and a lot of history with trades. He suggested we trade 1 treasure instead of both if I wasn't sure then the second one later. He provided the e-mail address to request Paypal funds from and it was suspicious. Doesn't match his name shown on Paypal whatsoever (he made sure to send me pictures that included his inflated Paypal balance). I did a quick search on the address and it was reported previously in a steamrep report on a different steam account that has been banned. In the report, the victim described almost exactly the same scam. When I confronted the scammer and told him we would not be doing this trade, he acted like he wanted to go get this other report cleared that he says must be someone stealing his identity and made sure to tell me I should unfriend him if we're done (getting rid of evidence in the process I guess).​

Provide Evidence:

The piece of evidence that finally proved to me I was dealing with a scammer was the matching Paypal e-mail with another scam report which detailed a similar process of the scammer contacting the victim and trying to build trust to get them to trade an item at the same time as requesting Paypal funds. The other time this Paypal e-mail showed up, it was associated with an entirely different steam account which has since been banned. If you dig through the comments on the profile of the new account, the majority of them were created on December 8th over the course of just a few minutes.​