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'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

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Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#71

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #42
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #39

i can pay for anything in the economy right now with BTC. It's called a crypto debit card... look it up. I don't understand this sentiment. A) 50% of btc transaction were fraudulent makes zero sense. The technology behind BTC ensures it can't be fraudulent. So unless someone wants to explain to me how the hackers broke BTC's consensus to buy... videogames? it makes noe sense.

i can pay for anything in the economy right now with BTC. It's called a crypto debit card... look it up. Not every organization accepts debit cards. Look it up.

[deleted]

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#72

Post by sebzim4500 »

thallium205 wrote: post #64
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, a couple of companies in the space are experimenting with the concept of an omni-pool. Essentially, since arbitrage bots are a constant you don't need an outside oracle to ensure there's very little slippage between assets. Addititionnally, since you are swapping inside the pool it does not incur a trade fee as you aren't trading some outside entity with a confirmation time. Obviously it gets deep in math, but…

Oh cool so a centralized payment system except stupid complicated. Sounds like another winning crypto invention to me.

Not sure about the others but Solana is not centralized.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#74

Post by rosndo »

flotzam wrote: post #59
mr_cyborg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Stolen money is used to buy bitcoin 2. Bitcoin is obfuscated by purchasing things online with it 3. Those online assets can be sold for cash

The obfuscation in step 2 seems very superficial. Like, is the IRS not going to ask where you got your stacks of Steam codes from?

Your bank will probably be the first one to ask, lying is a felony. (As is money laundering, of course)

Also Valve will be looking for this too, as required by their bank.

This is an incredibly unrealistic money laundering scheme, entirely fabricated by mr_cyborg.

The truth is that the “fraudulent transactions” here are double-spends, because Steam was accepting 0-conf payments in an unsafe way.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#75

Post by Beltalowda »

janandonly wrote: post #2

Unfortunately no details were given about what makes 50% of all bitcoin transactions “fraudulent” ? What does that even mean? * did someone try to send something other then bitcoin to a ₿ address? * did a client claim he payed and did the payment seem to fail on his end? * did a client not realise that you as payee also pay for the network fee? Nowadays these kind of problems would be easily prevented by using bitcoi…

Steam marked me as a "fraud" because I used my European Revolut card to try and make a purchase when I lived in Indonesia.

I get that they don't want European people to pay Indonesian prices through a VPN or whatnot, but I was living in Indonesia and living off a local salary; I thought marking me as a "fraud" was rather harsh; with the increased ease of international banking there are loads of cases where this is perfectly legit (Spotify also doesn't allow it, but is far less harsh in how they communicate it – Netflix posed no problems; it's also circumventable by using gift cards, which is how I used Spotify, but I never tried this for Steam).

Anyway, I'd wager a significant chunk of the "fraud" cases is stuff like this: circumvention of regional pricing.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#76

Post by netheril96 »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #55
berkes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you launder money on steam? Buying swords or funny hats? Buying hundreds of games and then never play any?

Buy TF2 keys and trade them to another account? Or CSGO skins? It's incredibly liquid and there are third party marketplaces for cashing out

They are not more liquid than BTC itself. Why not just sell the BTC directly?

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#77

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

reaperducer wrote: post #42
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #39

i can pay for anything in the economy right now with BTC. It's called a crypto debit card... look it up. I don't understand this sentiment. A) 50% of btc transaction were fraudulent makes zero sense. The technology behind BTC ensures it can't be fraudulent. So unless someone wants to explain to me how the hackers broke BTC's consensus to buy... videogames? it makes noe sense.

i can pay for anything in the economy right now with BTC. It's called a crypto debit card... look it up. Not every organization accepts debit cards. Look it up.

I don't think i've ever run into one here in the US that didn't let me use my crypto card.

I don't even remember the last time i carried cash?

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#78

Post by bastawhiz »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #68
jpollock wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is substantial exchange rate risk. If Valve didn't want to see any forex risk on the sale, they end up incurring it on refund. If people are using it as an easy way to store money in USD and then convert back to BTC when the rate goes up, that can get expensive in a hurry. It could also be that they used Coinbase or some other provider to act as a processor, and Coinbase charged the merchant if there were charg…

>If people are using it as an easy way to store money in USD and then convert back to BTC when the rate goes up, that can get expensive in a hurry. Why would anyone do this? In what universe is buying games and then requesting refunds easier than clicking buy/sell on coinbase/kraken/etc.

Did steam charge a transaction fee for refunds? If not, there's your answer.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#79

Post by JKCalhoun »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #31
erk__ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely using stolen credit card credentials to buy bitcoin and then use them to buy things on Steam. They already have a massive problem with that without introducing bitcoin into the equation

that doesn't make any sense. The 'fraud' in your scenario and where the point of contention lies is between the the credit card company and the exchange where it was onramped. There's no way the exchange is then going to go through the effort to track the btc to steam and say 'Hey, that transaction that didn't come from our exchange wallet was fraud i want the BTC back.' Also - That's just like fraud with extra steps…

Perhaps stolen credit cards have checks in place to immediately flag them as fraudulent?

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#80

Post by abi »

IgorPartola wrote: post #15

At this point is BTC a good idea? Does it actually provide any damn value at all at a macro level?

Say you're a Ukrainian fleeing refuge and you want store your life's savings somewhere safe. Pretty damn useful there. If you don't want to deal with the price fluctuations of BTC or ETH, buy stablecoins instead.
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