The 2 week ban serves as a warning for you to be more careful who you trade with in the future. Admins don't ban users unless there is convincing evidence that the trade actually did take place. It is your responsability to do background checks on who you trade with and that the items you trade for don't come from scammers.

I understand that completely. However, I was still given the option to appeal my ban and was strongly encouraged to do so by the moderator in charge of handing out the ban, after explaining to him my situation. I feel my situation is a little different (I understand everyone claims this) and have provided whatever evidence I have to back up my appeal.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/groups/tf2outpost/discussions/0/558747922562007365/#c622954302094710836

Sorry but I should have been more clear with what I was asking. Is it possible for a different moderator have a look at my case or only the mod assigned to my appeal has the right to do that? I was assigned to "Banned" and I don't know if he's away on holidays or has backlog of appeals to look at. I don't think i'm being impatient it's just that i'm 3 days away from serving the full 14 day ban period and I feel it would be a waste to not have my appeal looked at. If it were looked at there's a small chance the ban period gets removed or shortened. I understand this is a volunteer service and if it is not possible to have another moderator who is free attend do it, I guess I will just accept it and wait for the full ban period to end without having my appeal looked at. Thank you once again for responding.

We have dedicated appeals staff, as we do for every department. Staff does not cross over to other departments unless requested/necessary.

Knowingly trading with a scammer or not does not make a difference. Our policy is the same for both cases, hence claiming "I didn't know" or "it was not my intent to" will not make any difference.

I suggest you wait for the ban to expire and be very careful who you trade with in the future. It may take more time and give you more work but it won't jeopardize your reputation.

The thing is I am very careful, but i've completed 12,000 trades in the past 4 months which is a huge volume and errors occure more often. Regardless of how careful someone tries to be you can't be perfect. If you do 100 trades sure it's easy to not slip up but the closer you get to 1 million trades the harder it becomes regardless of how perfect someone thinks they are.

If we were bots then sure no problem. It doesn't seem fair that if you slip up twice in 24,000 trades you get PERMA banned. Even banks and companies have 1-5% allowances for unreported cash. This is 0.000001% we're talking about. It's not that I don't check that's why I got into this problem i've declined hundreds of trades from scammers but I missed 1 from sheer volume and human error.

2 people are in court for murder. 1 slips and knocks a pot over their balcony which lands on a strangers head and ends up killing the stranger. Another kills someone intentionally by shooting them. Is there no difference between the 2 cases? Should they both be punished equally?

I have no problems with being banned for 2 weeks over a mistake. However I think this serving as my first and final warning is a bit too harsh over a mistake. Are rules in place to punish people who abuse them or to punish accidents? I understand that these rules are in place to make the community a better place, but how is someone who slipped once in 12,000 trades over 4 months bad to the community? If I got into a trade with a scammer alt for an unusual worth 10-100 buds I would understand but this is not the case.

Appeals are not made to discuss policies. We applied the policy to your case and this is the result. If you intend to discuss a policy then suggest a better one with supporting arguments and data to back them up, instead of saying how unfair or bad it may be - this leads nowhere.

We also follow SR guidelines for tags, therefore you need to bring this up to them first as they are known for tagging people for 1-3 offenses for trading with scammers.

Okay, I will do that. Thank you for your response.