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grody_antagonic 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:14am
Fake Reviews
Hello everyone. So I recently spotted some really suspicious thing while trading on barter...
I traded with this user a lot of games lately through barter. New games, just came out and most of the time pretty bad stuff too. Fake-Games from russia or whatever. Now, the thing I noticed was, that this guy reviewed a damn lot of these games positive, while shortly after he had received a seemingly unlimited number of keys for these games and traded them on barter...
Well, since the games where new I traded for them. But since I have this guy on my friendlist, I noticed this trend more and more often, on a daily basis. Mostly buying the game, giving a positive review and after that having keys up for trade on barter. He never gave negative reviews and always these trashy russian fake-games...
Also the games seem to have always a whole bunch of positive reviews, getting them an overly positive rating most of the time in just a few days.

So... what's going on there? Loophole in the system? Conspiracy? I don't know, but it seems fishy.
Last edited by grody_antagonic; 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:29am
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Showing 1-5 of 5 comments
SirViolentDeath 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:24am 
This is something myself and a few others were aware of and honestly I do not know what to do about it. I suspect it's positive reviews for keys but I cant prove it.
Last edited by SirViolentDeath; 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:24am
#1
grody_antagonic 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:28am 
Hm, it's sad that it can't be proven yet... since that would actually be something that can get them kicked from Steam...
Last edited by grody_antagonic; 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:29am
#2
talgaby 5 Sep, 2017 @ 9:11am 
Bought reviews. It has been happening for years now. Entire Russian, Vietnamese, and maybe even Chinese groups are built on it. This is also the reason many can see a lot of those fake games with 60%+ scores, even if your review page shows 3 of 20 reviews positive; most of the positive ones are in a language the users are not filtering for.
#3
Occular Malice 5 Sep, 2017 @ 7:25pm 
Agreed it's too bad. There's a pattern you can show, but it's more like trying to prove a murder by circumstance without a smoking gun. Without the actual proof of the exchange of reviews for keys (which is outside of Steam so you'll never get the proof unless you have inside access to those systems) then Steam/Valve won't do anything. Also like many other scams the scammers keep coming up with, it's not hurting Steam's bottom line so they're not going to bother throwing resources at it.
#4
Chudah 5 Sep, 2017 @ 9:05pm 
Originally posted by Occular Malice:
Agreed it's too bad. There's a pattern you can show, but it's more like trying to prove a murder by circumstance without a smoking gun. Without the actual proof of the exchange of reviews for keys (which is outside of Steam so you'll never get the proof unless you have inside access to those systems) then Steam/Valve won't do anything. Also like many other scams the scammers keep coming up with, it's not hurting Steam's bottom line so they're not going to bother throwing resources at it.

Honestly, Valve should default to the overall rating for your selected language with an option for it to show the overall rating for reviews in all languages if selected. This would mostly fix the issue (at least for non-Russian/Chinese/Vietnamese speakers).
Last edited by Chudah; 5 Sep, 2017 @ 9:11pm
#5
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Date Posted: 5 Sep, 2017 @ 8:14am
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