In fight against spammers, Steam now restricts accounts until users show hard cash


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In fight against spammers, Steam now restricts accounts until users show hard cash

In an attempt to combat phishing and spamming, Steam today announced a raft of activity restrictions on accounts that do not show purchase activity.

Valve's digital store will no longer provide certain community benefits until a user has spent $5 or added a minimum of $5 to their account. The benefits include sending friend invites, opening a group chat, voting on Greenlight or submitting content on the Steam Workshop. A full list is here.

"We've chosen to limit access to these features as a means of protecting our customers from those who abuse Steam for purposes such as spamming and phishing," offered a Steam update. "Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do.

"One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5 in Steam."

Source: Polygon

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Good; that'll hopefully end the dozen-or-so friend requests I've been getting every day for the past few weeks from blank/private level 0 accounts.

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I think it's curbed them a bit, but it hasn't eliminated them completely; was pretty quiet for me last night and this morning, but four more friend requests popped up this afternoon, so far.

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Do you guys not keep your profiles to friends only or something?  I only ever had weird requests when I had foil cards up on the market.

My inventory is set to friends only, so that makes the spam more infuriating.

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Good move on Valve's part. I'm a regular customer, so anything they can do to improve the service is fine with me. :yes:

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Slight annoyance as I have a friend who I can't add to Steam to play Left 4 Dead 2 cause it's the only game on his account and he got it for free when they were giving it out for Christmas (I think) 2 years ago.

 

As much as it will limit spam and such, I wouldn't be surprised if this also doubles as a way to entice people to spend money on the store.

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Can't say I get any steam spam. but this will have little effect. just like being a paying users doesn't limit spam in MMO's.

 

Spammers don't pay for their accounts and the stuff they buy anyway. it's all done in some kind of pre-pay then cancel payment type of scam.

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Seems like a reasonable policy. Although It's a bit annoying I imagine for people who like physical copies of games they use in steam (it states that these don't remove the limitations)

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Good move.
 

Slight annoyance as I have a friend who I can't add to Steam to play Left 4 Dead 2 cause it's the only game on his account and he got it for free when they were giving it out for Christmas (I think) 2 years ago.



Get him to add $5 to his account ** Boom ** job done

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What if you buy your Steam games from another source? I recently bought Cities Skylines Steam Download from a large electronic vendor here in Sweden. It was cheaper than Steam store. Do the restrictions apply to anyone who hasn't spent money in Steam?

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What if you buy your Steam games from another source? I recently bought Cities Skylines Steam Download from a large electronic vendor here in Sweden. It was cheaper than Steam store. Do the restrictions apply to anyone who hasn't spent money in Steam?

Yeah, the restrictions still apply if the games you own were bought elsewhere.

 

 

The below actions will not remove limited user restrictions:

  • Activating a retail game on Steam
  • Playing free demos
  • Adding a non-Steam game as a shortcut
  • Adding/playing promotional trials like Free Weekends
  • Free to Play games (Examples: Alien Swarm, free versions of Portal and Team Fortress 2)
  • Activating promotional CD Keys from hardware or graphic card manufacturers
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