Accepted Report: 76561198260268018 - ([TF2] Team Fortress 2 Items)

Scam Report

Report Type: [Gambling] Fake gambling website
Virtual item type involved: [TF2] Team Fortress 2 Items

Accused profile: 76561198260268018

Victim profile: 76561198177795750

What happened? Description:

A random person named Ozzy Montana added me and I added them back to see who it was and what they wanted. He claimed that he worked on this site called www.tf2aqua.com and would pay me weekly if I would advertise his site somewhere on my profile. After further talking to him and seeing his site I knew he was trying to scam me with a fake gambling website scam. He said he would make it so I would win a pot weekly and I knew he was lying and wanted me to trade items to him for free acting like it would be going into a pot then he would lie and say I can't get my items and would have to send more items for it to work. That's how these gambling website scams usually work at least. I pretended to go along with what he was saying in order to get more information out of him and I went and searched through his source code to see that the website was basically just one big JavaScript animation. He had gotten a library of hundreds of random user's steam profile pictures and names and uses them to impersonate the people acting like they are actually winning something and are actually saying things in the chat. He also has a library of TF2 item pictures and names from the steam community market using them to make items and pots seem more legitimate. If you look through the game.js, template.js, and chat.js code files you can see how he sets it up so it randomly generates people to show up and how it randomly generates items to show up as well. This is an obvious scam and hopefully, something will be done about it. He is also falsely using steam's terms and conditions to try and further "legitimize" the site and protect himself against people who've gotten scammed retaliating by saying that admins and mods will not be held accountable for fraudulent practices. Idk if there are any laws against this or if it's illegal but it seems serious nonetheless. I've contacted Steam Support about this issue already to see if there's anything they can do about it and I'm going to file a report with IC3 for fraudulent lottery website. If you have any other questions please don't hesitate to ask. I just want this guy to be stopped and hopefully be able to prevent anyone less informed about this scam to be scammed.​

Provide Evidence:

View attachment 689674 View attachment 689677 I randomly got a friend invite from this person called "Ozzy Montana" and thought maybe I had played a game with him in the past or something, so I accepted to see who it was. He told me that he worked for a site called tf2aqua.com and that he would pay me weekly for advertising his site on my profile. Already drawing suspicions, I decided to try and go along and get more information out of him. I asked what the purpose of the website was and he said it was a jackpot website and I knew then that something was definitely off about this guy. As soon as he said he linked me to the website I knew it was a scam. Since I code websites from time to time I could tell that it was just an elaborate JavaScript animation essentially to scam people out of their items. Luckily he didn't get any of my items since I've known about the fake gambling site scam for a while too. Here is the link to the website::https://www.tf2aqua.com/

https://www.tf2aqua.com/js/chat.js
https://www.tf2aqua.com/js/game.js
https://www.tf2aqua.com/js/lib/template.js

View attachment 689675 View attachment 689676 I dug around through the website's source code to give more proof it's a scam. As you can see from the links above these are the most incriminating js code files from all of his source code. He randomly generated chat messages and attaches them to a random image from some random steam user's profile from the image library he has of them. There are hundreds of images and names he's collected from random steam user's profiles and are using them to impersonate people to try to get other's to believe his scam is real and people are actually winning. He asked me to pick someone's name that was in "PARTICIPANTS" section of the website and I picked the player "ROBERT_69". I knew he was going to edit something in the code or use some sort of program to make it so the website would say he won some randomly generated amount of money by getting some randomly generated items. He also has a library full of TF2 item names and pictures from the steam community market. The links to the code above show how the animations he does to make it look like people have won and like people are joining the games/are chatting work. This website is basically just one big JavaScript animation made to scam people out of their items. Most of the people's profiles he is impersonating on the website seem to be foreign people/people with low-level accounts/people with vac bans/people with private/or friends-only profiles. I have tried contacting some of these people whose name's pop up on the site to tell them about what's going on but I have had little luck in doing so. I am also planning on reporting his website to the IC3 so it can be taken down for being a fraudulent lottery website.

If you take a look at the terms of service on his website, it says that any admins/moderators cannot be punished for fraudulent practices. I'm guessing this is how they protect themselves when people try and report them after they get scammed. Also, it claims that the website is powered by "Steam Terms and Conditions" and I was wondering if he could get in legal trouble for falsely advertising and saying that the site is governed under Steam's terms and conditions when it really isn't?

If you have any more questions please feel to ask me. I really hope to get this person's website taken down and having steam take some kind of action so less informed people won't get scammed.​

I can send the unedited version of the source code screenshots if you want. I was trying to point out how he was getting people's pictures and the item pictures to show up and look like they were real.

Ok thank you for reviewing this though, I just don't want anyone to get scammed out of their items.