Should the Steamgifts profile style be changed to make it harder for the impersonators to scam?
It's hard to be scammed on that method. Guy gave away like 100+ and have 300+ rep and he still have 5games... Pls...
I was trolling one of them for a while XD
http://i.imgur.com/2pVmIBa.png
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you need to hide the name of the other guy there, it will be considered as calling out.
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The name of the person means nothing considering it's a fake account, although censoring the name might help reduce confusion for the actual person who uses that name.
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i can find some people on steam with that info, maybe even the wrong ones, so it's calling out.
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Lol, nice one! ..I'm always amazed how angry they get when they don't succeed their scamming attempt lol.
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" I haven't regifted them, I gave them to friends" xD
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yes, it has been suggested a lot in the past
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Yes, it would be good suggestion. But people get scammed is because they are careless and too young.
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Easiest way to avoid impostors is to get enhanced steam which adds a permalink to their SG profile on their steam page.
That being said, I do like the idea mentioned, of having more information from a users steam account on their SG profile.
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Maybe I'm just cynical, but my first thought is: victims won't quickly realise anything, that's why they were victims. :( Hopefully they only lose a cheap bundle key the first time, and learn something from the experience. Maybe not rush to believe the anonymous internet person next time...
I think if a person is trusting random websites a scammer tells them to visit, they are going to get scammed all day long, no matter what admins here do... :)
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I'm probably equally cynical when I say, I think when suggestions about this are made, it's to protect the person being impersonated rather than the one being scammed of something of value.
In some sense you can 'blame' the victim for being careless, but I think it's unfortunate that impersonated traders can get their rep smeared by those who were fooled by these scammers. The main defense traders seem to have against impersonators is to change their profile pic to an impersonator warning, as the OP here has currently done.
In the end, I'm saying the suggestions that are being made should be considered for their potential to protect the innocent traders/bystanders, even if it means the ones being fooled are left to learn the internet trust lesson the hard way.
EDIT... To add, my hope is that with some form of warning about impersonators on the trade feedback page or similar, at least then when recently scammed users sign up to steamgifts to leave negative rep, they may realise their mistake before the -rep is sent.
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Hmm, that's a good point... I wonder what sort of warning message potential scam victims would notice, though, before they get scammed. :(
Impersonators copy someone's name and picture, but everything else is different - Steam level, number of years on Steam, games, badges, groups, friends, etc. Even though it's obviously not the same person, they still manage to find new victims. It's probably worth a try, but I'm not sure how you would get people to realise hey, this steamgifts profile that guy gave me is someone else's profile. :(
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While I also like the idea of let people learn their lessons, I wouldn't risk anyone's property in doing so. So if we have to make a damned big red title about "check if this the real person or not" on their profile like on Mullin's attached image ~ 3 comments above this to forcefeed the security stuff for people, I'm not against it. Maybe a similar, nonchanging text would be the best, as it poses the minimum problems to the servers.
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Hmm, if I'm reading correctly, people aren't expecting to eliminate scammers, but would like their victims to stop blaming the wrong person?
I guess if Steamgifts profiles showed a small box with additional Steam info, taken from the last time that person sync'd their profile, it might help. Would probably be worth a try, if it's not going to add too much strain on the poor hamster... :) Seems he's been running hard all day long... :)
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No, I've just meant that people should learn their mistakes - but who knows how serious the first mistake can be? So best to prevent it. While it would be great if the support staff could pay more attention to scammers because they can cause a lot of problems in short time, but then raising awareness works much better with less effort, therefore I think it should be the number 1 priority (You know, don't make a system for cars that have a fancy siren if one breaks into the car, but don't let your wallet visible on the seat [Let's ignore the car-thiefs, as there are way more break-in and thefts with cars])
Also, it's really easy to make another profile, shape it to the crude version of a trader's then continue the whole thing (maybe like 5-10$ required to lift trade block and get some emoticons/badges or similar, to copy the person). In that case raising awareness and teach people to pay attention has a better result on a long term
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I recently had an impersonator trying to add me impersonating SG admin lol
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Nope, checked his SG id and its someone else. Reported him to SG but no idea what happened with that after the report.
Also any idea why cg's steam profile is private? very easy to impersonate him like this and scam newbies this way.
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Probably just doesn't want the rest of us to be jealous of his SG admin... whatever?
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First I wanted to tell you how that's not possible since Steamgifts has no influence on Steam and what username people choose, but this certainly makes sense and if people would still get scammed with this one it's definitely their fault.
But on the other hand if people would just click on the link to the impersonated user's Steam profile they would get the same result.
I don't trade so I have no idea how easy I could be scammed and I saw long-term traders being scammed, so maybe it could happen to me as well, but I still think that with some research most cases could have been prevented.
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Honestly, people should download Enhanced steam to cross reference with their steam profile. I don't see how changing steamgifts would help because then they could just link both the impersonated steam profile and steamgifts profile. It's up to the user to check the profile from the chat.
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I think the practicality of it is a bit hard, but yeah, it would be nice if SG implemented something to limit impersonators.
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Its not hard to understand they are a scammer. I have seen 90% of them are kids in the ages of 12 - 16yrs who does such type of scams. They just change names to act like the real one so just verify the name and you will find they are fake.
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It should stay as one's own responsibility to make sure one doesn't get fooled. And just make it a thumb rule to a-l-w-a-y-s check the profile beforehand. Here Enhanced Steam comes in pretty handy. Just make it a habit to use the browser with Enhanced Steam installed, click on both the SteamGifts link to see if it's really the user with said amount of +rep, and also always check SteamRep (which also is included in the list of links Enhanced Steam provides for each profile) to see if the user is marked as a scammer!
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Or this:
With an option for activating it or not in our profile.
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I added a couple of things to the main post, apparently most people here thinks that new users were born knowing of the existence of Enhanced Steam.
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nobody said that, however the site cannot babysit users constantly
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Maybe a big "You are not friends with this person" note on each trading profile. Maybe people would realize they're not talking to the real person.
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One thing which would significantly reduce the confusion and the risk is to force using the same usernames on both SG and Steam (in my case it's the same).
If for some reason this isn't feasible, then at least display the Steam name near the SG name, like this:
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That wouldn't really be helpful - people can change their usernames on Steam, that's the entire point of the scam (they change it to match the SGifts / Steam name of a high-rep individual). We simply need a notice so new traders know to check that the SGifts profle and Steam profile match up.
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TLDR: Suggestion for a User Status (text box) on SteamGifts, status would be visible on all steamgifts users pages, and the user can update this status in the settings.
the person that was impersonating yomisma switched to me, i had to change my avatar, when he saw that he switched to user Vanatic
a lot of people here are saying that its the victims fault, i dont understand this logic: if a killer killed you, is it your fault that you are dead?
i understand that its not steamgifts fault, but it would help new users, and its useful for old users, so i support the suggestion of yomisma, but i would also like it to be simpler:
a place on steamgifts profile page where person can write whatever he/she wants, like a status, this personal field would be visible on all http://www.steamgifts.com/user/ pages (giveaways, trades and feedback) and you can edit this field in the steamgifts settings, field doesn't need to be big maybe 500 characters. and you can write there that you like potatos, trains or whatever. or that your currency of choice is bad rats, or just inform people that you have an impersonator. :)
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Would love to have a text box like that. Pretty much stopped trading here all together because of multiple impersonators. I've suggested it to support before as well and received this answer:
"You should probably ask a couple traders on top of your feedback list to edit their feedback and include a warning about the impersonators. Maybe do so for top feedback message on each page."
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Yes, please. Do that. Steamgifts feedback profiles are still being abused by impersonators.
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Hi,
I was impersonated and now have a negative feedback of something that never existed.
I reported the user the staff but it's pending for 4 days. Hope they can get back at it and remove this negative feedback.
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I just recently got my first impersonator, a guy who has now impersonated 8 Steamgifts' users so far, and that will probably continue to do the same. I know he has already scammed several people. He's not registered here, and he targets new users to scam and users with more that 100 positive votes to impersonate.
I have one question, where can I exactly report him? I already did on Steamrep, but after several days it's still "pending".
And I also have one suggestion: since he links the victims to the profile of a Steamgifts' user with good reputation, why not changing the profile design here on Steamgifts to show more information, like the Steam trading system? Steam level, Steam user since..., maybe even number of owned games, this way the victims would quickly realize they are not trading with the right user.
Edit: After reading some answers, here's a couple of things I'd like to add:
As for traders with good reputation, they won't know they have an impersonator until
a) someone finds out and it's nice enough to let them know
b) they end up with a negative vote for something they didn't do
As for victims, who are normally new to trades, new on Steamgifts...
a) When the impersonator links them to a profile with good reputation, they have no reason to believe that the profile doesn't really belong to the user they're dealing with
b) They are new, they surely have never heard of Enhanced Steam!!
That's why I think a modified and unique Steamgifts profile will make this site a bit safer.
Something like this image:
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