Declined Steamrep SCAM REPORT Accused: 76561197971691194 (Mattie!)

New account... proxy address used.... rant with no evidence to back anything up... looks legit.

But this isn't even a real report... By all means make a report in the proper location if you feel there is enough evidence against the victim...but I highly recommend using your real account to make the report vs this one.

I've moved this back and will push it over to reports for now - the Op can post more to the discussion if he has more to support the claims.

TLDR: I didn't knowingly buy any item from an SR banned user, nor would I ever desire to do so. To avoid helping scammers and also to avoid dramafest threads like these, I spend hours agonizing and skipping purchases that look even 1% shady. This makes life very difficult as a collector (so I rarely buy anything), but I try to set a good example since I very much want traders to do their due diligence.

Not TLDR:
Some context (that, if nothing else, might be helpful for people who stumble on this thread):

Anyway, the claim apparently above is that because I bought an item from Opskin.com's marketplace, that it was trading with a banned user. For anyone unfamiliar with it, Opskins.com is (AFAIK) the biggest CSGO buying/selling site-- as expected, it has bots handling the backend via trade offers. The link the accuser provides is one to csgoexchange that is one of the few sites I've found that can tell you some semblance of reliable CSGO inventory history (tf2outpost tracks it, too, but doesn't seem to get as many snapshots as csgoexchange). The bottom of the page shows the item history of the item moving from one person to another, with the SR banned person having the item before it went into the world of OPSkins trade bots where I purchased it.

I know we've had lots of talks over the years on how to handle this kind of thing when Steamcommunity market items were posted by scammers and purchased by traders. It's been a really tough area. In fact, nowadays it's nearly impossible to figure out the origin of a market item with the owner's profile hidden (or at least I don't know of any easy way-- if you do know, enlighten us!).

Before these purchases, I was new to the CSGO trading scene (and still am), and most of the item verification tricks / tools I've found have been those I stumbled upon since I started purchasing items in late July of this year, so if you have better tools, please do share (ideally in a guide).

Unfortunately, like Steam's market, Opskins makes it incredibly difficult to figure out who was the original owner of an item. It's just an opaque listing of a specific item and a price in "credits". Figuring out the owner is quite hard and it seems like most CSGO trading sites do not make item research easy (e.g. I don't see any way to research the item easily on CSGOSkins.com either, but I bet they ban SR banned users).

I've purchased 4 items from Opskins.com in my experimental collecting in CSGO. The primary items I was using opskins for were very high-end (>$900) rare items. I also purchased two lower cost items (which this fire elemental is one of-- ~80).

For the very expensive/rare items, I spent multiple days trying to deduce who the owner was originally for the items. Since Opskins doesn't show you the item ID, the owner ID, the float (which I learned is a semi-unique random number representing the visual quality of an item), or even the current bot holding the item, there's no unique way to identify most items via Google or item searches, etc.

But I did spend hours/days researching the highest end items before the purchase to the point of OCD. If it helps people in the future trying to do research, here's the crazy approach I figured out for more unique items:

• Go to this page: https://opskins.com/?loc=bot_status
• Now open the Steam inventory of ALL ~180 BOTS on csgoexchange. (I will wait here while you try that! I'm not sure if this is all their bots or only the ones available right now. Having an addon like tree-style tabs for Firefox helps you with managing this research slightly.)
  
• Now search each backpack for an item that might be the item pictured on Opskins. For more common items, you're out of luck because it's simply too many items to compare. For rare items, you may only have some hits to review when you manually click/type filters for every individual bot's inventory.
• Check each item that might be the one pictured on Opskins website and check the float number (for comparison to the inspection, and collector value) and see the owner's history.
  
• How certain are you that it's the one pictured? If there's any doubt/confusion, you probably have to pass because it's too risky-- or you have to continue comparing ALL items that might be it before you can narrow down that you found the right one.
• If you have the float sometimes you can then look at the float tier ratings on csgoexchange for that item and see if there are a lot of duplicate floats ranked together. Since these are random floats, any identical floats are dupes. Stay away from those.
  
• If you were able to positively identify the item, and it looks like the history is clean and not duped, maybe you're good and add it to your cart on OPSkins
  
• You still can't be 100% sure that the backpack snapshot on csgoexchange is telling you anything useful. For some items the history starts with the bot and you don't see any other .

This whole process literally takes hours per purchase, because it's not just 1 item you have to research, it's pretty much all of Opskins' inventory of that item type since you don't have a clear mapping from a bot inventory to the website. No trader can reasonably be expected to go through this to research the items, but I made myself do it-- at first to figure out if I *could* somehow reverse engineer the owner, but ultimately to be very sure the big items I wanted weren't feeding some scammer.

For my Deagle, I hadn't figured out this process-- lucked out, I guess. For my Howl, I discovered on my own how to do this research above and tried it out for hours on different guns before shelling out 1k for that.

For the Fire Elemental, I was looking through opskins P2000 stattrak skins, found one that had a Dota2 sticker (I didn't know these existed), fanboy'd about it, and just impulse bought it without even thinking about going through the crazy process of researching every bot's inventory. Of course one of the items I didn't invest a weekend researching turned out that a banned user had touched it in the past. There were plenty of these guns to choose from on opskins, if I had seen it had been touched by a banned user I would have simply moved to the next one on the market.

For my fire serpent, it was a true collectible so I agonized and analyzed the few ones I saw on opskins bots.

If someone knows an easier way to get research for item history for items on Opskins, please share it with the community so traders can actually do this research sanely. The only way I can think of how to do this is to petition Opskins to ban using SteamRep, get them to be less opaque about the history of the item, or simply avoid buying from them altogether.

I'm happy to provide anything anyone asks when they go to research this. If you have any specific questions here, I'm happy to answer them. I definitely didn't buy from Opskins so that a banned user would get credits-- nor do I feel it would have been sane/reasonable for any trader to do the above research for every purchase. (I'd be stunned if anyone but the most OCD traders would go through that process.)

Uh, how? The only way I know how to do this is the above. If it's easy to find item history, please tell me so I don't kill myself every time I buy a stupid item.

*Edit*:

I absolutely bend over backwards to check histories for collectibles. It's not a "doesnt do it" -- it's the sort of innocent mistake that happens when you buy from an opaque market and history is difficult. The entire premise of trades with banned users is about innocent mistakes being expected-- we know it happens to people. And this isn't even a case where you can check the owner easily (or I can't, as a csgo trade n00b).

To be clear, my CSGO items were pretty much only purchased from OPSkins.com or the Steam Community Market. I purposely toss every non-collectible item on the Steam market to get rid of it.

Adding some more info, if it helps:

I know the opskins purchase isn't in dispute here-- but just for completeness/transparency sake, I'm attaching a screenshot of the CSGO purchase this summer and a screenshot of the trade in question. (I'm also including an MP4 attachment to show Steam browser navigation, etc., if that's useful.) If you need more, I'm happy to provide any details/alternative views/live screensharing/whatever.

I've also included a screenshot of the item delivery history from opskins, if that's of any use. If you click on the link for the Fire Elemental, it brings you here which doesn't offer much but the price history for that type of item on opskins' market.

The bot in question that delivered the item to me via trade offer was this one:

| steamname: [OPSKINS] Bot #24
| steam3ID: [U:1:223885369]
| steamID32: STEAM_0:1:111942684
| steamID64: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198184151097
| customURL: http://steamcommunity.com/id/bot24_opskins
| steamrep: http://steamrep.com/profiles/76561198184151097

As mentioned, I didn't see/know what csgo.exchange said for the previous owners for this item, I was just buying from opskins' gallery without visibility to who put the item on their market. The trade itself was (obviously) handled solely with the bot that they automatically assigned to deliver the item. While I have tried to manually reverse engineer the history in very big purchases, I didn't go insane for this purchase (or I obviously wouldn't have added it to my shopping cart).



Let me know if anything else is desired.

I'm not hiding behind anything... never have. I'm not an Admin here - I'm a Moderator here. Tell me what I'm hiding by all means cause well my profile is public, my servers are public, my site is public. I honestly have no idea who you are or I don't care as I treat everyone the same. You didn't make a real report - I moved it here in the Report section to just avoid a bunch of crap conflict when I could have and should have just left it closed and placed where I had it and made you do a regular report the proper way, just as we make everyone else do and not show a lick of remorse about it. You wish to continue this report then by all means continue but don't be user bashing in any shape or form, keep it professional and straight to the point the same as I tell everyone else.

I understand this is where you're perceiving this as a "gotcha" moment to argue against communities policing the "trading with scammers" offenses. Outside of a report thread, I'd be happy to discuss my personal position on the topic (spoiler: it's not on the draconian side of that).

1. I agree that the majority of people don't knowingly or intentionally trade with scammers when that happens. Thankfully, for bans/cautions SR looks at, it's only in cases of intentional, long-term abuse, or suspected consistent intentional neglect that we'd care-- and even now it's not a part of our typical investigative/report policy. I've not reviewed all of the partner bans/cautions in this space to know how they apply their policies, but I've seen some cases where they are much more stringent. That being said, I've yet to look into a case where they didn't have strong reason to believe the trades were intentional.

In my case, I absolutely hold myself to a higher standard, not only because people who dislike SR will witchhunt morsels they can get their hands on, but because I volunteer a large amount of time and energy to the cause of fraud prevention in the community. I really work hard to set a good example wherever I can, so I bend over backwards when it comes to research. In the case of opskins research, as I said, I reverse engineered approaches so that I could be OCD about this for my collectibles. For the impulse/fun Fire Elemental purchase, I just bought it from the store and went to go play.

That red light analogy is terrible, though. There are no laws here and there's nothing here even slightly as obvious as a red light. The situation is more like you approach an intersection and they haven't finished installing the red light. In that world, you're expecting me to go inspect the open wiring box and check every wire/fuse's level of electrical current to deduce whether it's okay to drive through the intersection or not. Perhaps that makes sense if there are armed snipers who will shoot you if they think you're ignoring traffic lights... but it doesn't make sense to expect people to do that every day. In my case, I only did the full scale reverse engineering for items that were of the highest value. I believe that research to be above and beyond what's required for anyone-- but I did it to see how difficult it was (and also because I'm a bit OCD with regards to high-end collectibles). The trades-with-scammer stuff is intended as a means to catch people who are working with scammers or consistently turning a blind-eye to them in the name of personal profit. As we say in the FAQ, it's not intended to hurt innocent traders.

I tried reverse engineering the inspect URL and thought it might be useful, but multiple times I used it, it didn't work or led me to a private profile that I couldn't verify was a recent owner. Without experience here, I didn't go far with that hackery so I resorted to using the deep history inspection on the bots which had a clear trail. If it turns out the inspect URL can lead you to the previous owner most of the time, then I'll add it to the list of things to check for OPSkins in the future. Even then, the item's not in their inventory, so you're going to have to find some other approach to understand the float values and item history-- it's not enough to clear an item. Ultimately, the site really should be (1) banning or warning users for banned SR profiles like other major CSGO sites or (2) making the most recent owner info accessible.

2. The first link you offer includes an appeal decision I made to grant the appeal of solaris in a trading with scammers situation-- and I'm pretty sure that case was in a direct-trade situation with conversation with the seller and everything. The decision about the Trusted Seller's group membership was solely a SourceOp thing and nothing SR was doing. Most of the other links you include are people banned or cautioned by FoG since we stopped typically investigating trades-with-scammers policy. Others I see with SR tags had a repeated desire to work with scammers and there's not a reason to see them as accidental in active investigation.

None of the cases you linked appear to be related to SR going after people who made a market/shop purchase. You touted those accusations against SR as reasons to lynch me at the beginning of this thread.

I'm glad you linked some examples, because people reading those reports/appeals for those cases will see that those are not anything like the circumstances of this report.

3. I have no say in how this report is handled (typically an admin with the least ties to the accused handles it). Regardless, unlike brigades and witchhhunts on Reddit, though, reports aren't handled "by upvotes".

4. Yeah, I was more writing that as a guide for doing it now. For checking the bots, I usually found the item before going through all of them individually, so I don't recall how many opskins bots they used to have. I recall scrolling down until I saw ~40 at the time and giving up resaearching many items when I didn't find it in ~30 individual backpack searches. I definitely haven't ever had a desire to go through 180 bots and no sane person would do so (without a script, which might be a handy tool someone should write).

5. Everyone knows you can't use backpack snapshotting as gospel for the true path of an item. You always have to leave the door open that someone else (or many someones) had the item in-between the backpack snapshots (or a dupe was involved). This is why we ask for inventory history screenshots when trying to identify direct trades with banned users, and/or severe negligence. Yet we generally believe them when we see someone's name on there, but there could be other owners between the ones shown. For example, in this case you reported, it could have been someone else who listed the item on the market and profited, since it's not possible to tell from a snapshot (with a 12-day time difference) who owned it before going on the market. (That doesn't change the fact that I wouldn't have bought any item where I could see a banned user touched it recently.)

In the end, I don't honestly believe you think my purchase is something people should be shot for, you seem like you're just trying to make a policy point while doing so (happily) at my expense.

As someone who has butted heads with Mattie on internal policies more than a few times, I feel like I can handle this report fairly.

Like any other report, only a SteamRep admin can review this and make a decision; we already have procedures for reports against SteamRep or other community admins, and the same is true here. Mattie himself, or another admin who is close or unable to remain impartial in the case, is not allowed to make a decision. Expecting random "members of the community" to make a decision is not practical for this or any other kind of report, and quite simply not how we assess evidence. If another admin wishes to step in and intervene, please do so. The same goes for friend/partner admins who are not currently SteamRep staff as well. There will be no retaliation, and your standing with SteamRep will not be impacted for it, but you must give reasoning behind your feedback.

For the record, OPSkins does NOT use the SteamRep plugin, and tagged users are able to trade freely. As a SteamRep admin, Mattie should have been aware of that fact, and as a community admin he is held to a higher standard, but it's a natural assumption to make. From internal discussion, it appears a lot of staff were unaware of this. He's not the only SteamRep admin to be surprised with this fact, even if the only one to inadvertently buy something from a scammer because of it.

Having investigated myself, then consulted with a subject matter expert from r/globaloffensivetrade on this specific point, as well as the owner and founder of OPSkins.com, the functionality you describe here to discover the owner of an item is flaky, counter-intuitive, and really not intended to be used to find the seller. OPSkins' stance is more adhering to the community market, where a buyer/seller relationship is discouraged and for that reason the seller is not disclosed for individual items. While some users may be aware of one or more methods to track down an item's owner, I myself as a non-trading SteamRep admin was not able to do this with an arbitrary item until obtaining specific advice from the OPSkins owner, and from the looks of this report neither did Mattie. Csgo.exchange is an alternative option for finding past owners, by finding the item ID and current backpack, but as TF2 veterans know item tracks like csgo.exchange are prone to missing users in their history; record of a particular user owning an item is only recorded if someone views that backpack, and the inventory is public. Mattie, and some other SteamRep admins (myself included) may be picky about item history in the way described above, but we have never required that level of research even from an admin. Mattie's documented use of csgo.exchange for item history in most of his trades is commendable, but not required. That he failed to take such exhaustive steps in this one trade is not something we can hold against Mattie or any other trader.

SteamRep has never expected anyone to "reverse image search" community market owners, and to claim we have or do is preposterous. If you have any cases that are provably marked for that, with an admin giving those kinds of instructions, I want to see them. Link and screenshot those quotes (in the discussion board please, they are not related to this case), and the cases will be dealt with. In researching this case, it seems very similar to a "bought from community market" case, and not within our standards for a report. This in itself is an issue with OPSkins, and really the fundamental problem here. Mattie did not "knowingly trade with a marked scammer" but rather he bought an item from a fairly reputable store without knowing where the store got it, or that the store brokered items for scammers with relative anonymity. In addition to contacting the owner of OPSkins for his perspective on the case and on the practicality of finding a seller, SteamRep has opened a line of communication for OPSkins and intends to try and work with them to help make their trading site, and the CSGO community as a whole, a safer place.

Furthermore, I would like to officially note SteamRep's stance is not to entrap users like this. Even in cases where recognizing a scammer or shady seller would be much more straightforward, SteamRep gives substantially more leeway to non-admin traders. The only reason this report is receiving the attention from staff that it is, is because the accused is a community admin who is held to a higher standard. Were any other accused for this, the report would have zero merit and would be rejected.

My verdict in this report is that Mattie is not guilty of knowingly trading with a marked scammer. I will leave this report open in "Under Investigation" status for 1 week to allow for any partner/friend community admin to intervene if they feel I am inappropriately biased. After that week, if there is no dissent, the report will be closed and archived.

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Keep on topic or dont post, removed completely off topic posts. If you have any issues regarding off topic posts/removed posts, feel free to directly add me on steam to discuss. (not handling the report, just moderating the thread)

Copy of removed posts, for reference if anyone really wants to see them:

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