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It might not necessarily be that they lost money, it is possible it happened through the way you are suggesting, but opening up for crypto does mean Steam becomes a money laundering platform. Criminal creates a shit game and then uses the crypto to buy that game (with alt accounts) and since *very* few developers would be happy with getting paid in crypto, Valve has to convert it into fiat(?) currency.
That could be a problem but then that would be money laundering not fraud (and Steam won't be on hook for it - just like Amazon isn't for its gift cards).
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This does precisely nothing to “clean” the money as it doesn’t eliminate the direct link between you and the dirty bitcoins.
Forgive my ignorance, but does, for example, ransomware payments in, for example, bitcoin make the bitcoin "dirty"? The only context I have heard "dirty" coins in is if they have been stolen from a crypto platform, or I think stolen by a influential crypto bro.
Yep, also links to darknet markets and any other “bad actors” whose addresses are known.
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But how does any of that apply to the supposed "Steam purchases with stolen credit cards by way of Bitcoin" scheme?
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
2. Release some shitty game on steam that no one will play
3. Buy millions of copies of said shitty game with your illegitimate money using Bitcoin
4. Your illegitimate money is now revenue from your shitty game and can be taxed (Profit)
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The basic misunderstanding is on your part. “Money laundering” wasn’t mentioned by anyone but you. Stop inventing things. This is about valve getting fucked because they were accepting bitcoin payments with zero confirmations.
I think assuming money laundering was a fair assumption as the article only describes fraudulent activity and nothing else on the matter.
It works the other way around, people launder funds from steam into cryptocurrency. Either by buying items with stolen credit cards or by stealing steam accounts.
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Oh cool so a centralized payment system except stupid complicated. Sounds like another winning crypto invention to me.
Low Trade Fees, cross-colatorilization, instantanious and algorithmic liquidation. imagine i wanted to buy Tesla. I have no money but i do have GM Stock. This allows mee to trade GM directly for Tesla stock with no actual trade fee, because the trade never occurs until i pull all my money out out of the pool. So i am exposed to the asset without having to do the centralized exchange way of selling the asset (Incurrin…
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…
And? They don't report to you. So they don't have to explain anything to you. They don't have to defend their decisions to you.
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How does Walmart compare to that regarding purchases with ill-gotten cash?
Cash is completely fungible because there is no clear trace of money from one person to the next. If someone steals 100k of cash, there is a very low probability that the serial number of those bills were recorded somewhere. And even if they were, you couldn't easily trace the money though complex systems. Bitcoin on the other hand is a complete and open ledger. When these large heists that constantly happen, it is t…
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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.
Right so other crypto is just as good if not better for this?
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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
How would steam know what was used to pay for bitcoin they received?