After a bit of a vacation from trading I decided to put up various duplicate, extra, and unused items I had in my backpack. Currently I have 9 trades up and I generally bump them all at once. Since bumping 9 posts at once puts me longer on the front page I always get 1 to 3 instant friend requests. Some of these look like legitimate accounts, although their backpack is stripped of anything valuable, but most of them are fresh accounts with private profiles. If you add one of these accounts all they do is send you a phishing link and say something like, "My friend will pay b/o but he can't add you, here's his profile so you can add him" and other generic stuff like that.

Is there any plan to help prevent stuff like this? I'm basically forced to use trade offers simply because 99% of friend requests I get are from the same phishing bot. I've already blocked tons of them, but they keep coming every time I bump my trades. It's fairly annoying and to someone who is unaware it could be dangerous.

When you press the + to trade, go down to "Select backpack" under where the items you want should go. You can pick Dota 2 backpack from there or Steam Inventory if you're selling the actual game.

Originally posted by The Once and Future King:

There are groups like this for other things too. Doesn't mean it will work.

I sure hope it doesn't work, but I've seen a few almost fall for it. It's not the fact I think it will raise the price that I'm fighting, it's the fact that with so many people sharking it's easy for someone new to think it's worth that much when it's not and get badly scammed.

I just found out today that apparently there is an entire group dedicated to extreme highballing Genuine Archimedes in an attempt to artificially inflate its price to 2 buds. The current price for this item is around 10 keys. You can see that there is a little mismatch here.

I have a question about this entire thing because this scenario really concerns me. I was wondering if these types of trades should be considered extreme highballing or even sharking. I searched for these trades and I've seen a few people almost fall into giving decent unusuals for these worthless birds. I am happy the owner of the trade wasn't online fast enough to accept the unusual, otherwise I would be extremely open to mark him as a scammer.

The group is question is here:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/groups/genuinearchimedes

You can see that their entire goal is to obviously take over the price of the item by force by giving it artificial value and flooding the market with shark trades. I really hope something can be done about this before people get scammed by these people.