Originally posted by BwarePishing:

If scammers' account is banned before scammer sold any items,

dosen't it means restore those items which haven't sold yet harm nobody?

No.

Read the Steam Item Restoration Policy.

Restoration policy stems from times when Steam stopped duplicating stolen items as that decreased overall value (and criminals could abuse the system by stealing from themselves).

Legally speaking in many Countries, thieves have no rights to items they stole, nor do accounts that they controll and traded to - IF it can be proven that those accounts indeed are controled by the criminals. They DO boost newly created accounts as well as lowlevel stolen/bought accounts, with stolen items & wallet money & store points, no doubt about that.

BUT, since Steam has this policy, almost always a lawsuit to get Steam to give back the items/money/points would cost more then the net worth of these individual items/money/points - even with game library included.

We can argue Steam doesn't take enough responibility on their end, by leaving so many 1000's of forums and chatrooms - including official Steam forums & game hubs - to the phisher/spammers and porn-lusty. We gamers probably can band together with our insurance companies in large-scale law-suits. But who's gonna take the lead?