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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

#191

Post by squeaky-clean »

gruez wrote: post #188
jayd16 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>blacklists They wouldn't be blacklists. You only learn after the fact so its more about the analytics. >I'd tell them to fuck off. Well that's nice but if you get paid with stolen money, you don't just get to keep the money and tell them to fuck off. Steam would be liable to return the funds.

>They wouldn't be blacklists. You only learn after the fact so its more about the analytics. I mean, that goes back to my original question, why would they do this? Does bestbuy run analytics on the cash they receive to see how much % of their cash purchases were "fraudulent"? >Well that's nice but if you get paid with stolen money, you don't just get to keep the money and tell them to fuck off. Steam would be liable…

> Does bestbuy run analytics on the cash they receive to see how much % of their cash purchases were "fraudulent"?

Credit card companies do, yes.

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

#192

Post by mccorrinall »

ipaddr wrote: post #63
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?

It provided a great way to buy weed before it was legalized and transaction fees skyrocketed. Bitcoin at $5,000 a coin was extremely useful for transactions. Bitcoin at $50,000 make it less useful because of scaling issues.

You currently pay about 10 pennies for a transaction which is included in the next block.

Using Lightning is even cheaper.

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

#193

Post by deutschewelle »

gruez wrote: post #148
deutschewelle wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your comment is unjustified and incoherent. It is obvious to many of us what "fraudulent" mean here, it could be an array of: - previously flagged wallets moving through mixers - purchases and refunds to facilitate money laundering - converting to and from steam wallet to crypto etc. It is NOT at all ambiguous which is what you are insinuating as the basis for not reading past the headline and discouragin…

>It is obvious to many of us what "fraudulent" mean here, it could be an array of: >- previously flagged wallets moving through mixers So if someone robbed a bank, used that money to buy drugs, that money ended up in my hands somehow (eg. I bought from the same drug dealer), and I used that to buy a big mac, my big mac purchase is "fraudulent" as well? >- purchases and refunds to facilitate money laundering How does…

The crux of your argument appears to be that Gabe is lying and not to be trusted :D

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

#194

Post by giaour »

olalonde wrote: post #181
giaour wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are irreversible and if the Bitcoin is stolen that's not the merchant's problem. This seems consistent with the bitcoin ethos but incompatible how the economy and legal system work. If someone buys a physical item from your physical store with a hot check, a stolen credit card, or marked bills that were just stolen from a bank, you don't get to keep the money, even if police aren't able to recover the item you…

I do believe that you get to keep cash. I don't think I've ever heard of an instance of "dirty cash" getting seized back from a merchant. Do you have an example of that?

No, but I don't really have an example of a specific credit card chargeback, either. At least in the US, the police can seize the cash as evidence, and their duty is to return it to the rightful owner, not whoever happened to have it at the time of seizure.

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

#195

Post by gambiting »

exitb wrote: post #186
doomroot wrote: post #143

Context on what I believe they mean by "fraudulent". Steam back in the day used to accept 0 confirmation bitcoin spends. This means that the transaction has been gossiped on the bitcoin p2p network but had not yet been mined into a block and thus had minimal finality guarantees. Steam could see that they were going to receive a bitcoin payment (when the transaction was mined into a block) and would credit the users a…

Shouldn’t it make most sense in contexts exactly like Steam, where the merchant can take the goods back in case of a fraudulent transaction?

It did, and they did. That's probably exactly why they allowed it like that in the first place - if the transaction is fraudulent then simply remove the user's entitlement, but offer instant access for better experience.

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

#196

Post by leppr »

rosndo wrote: post #115
httpsterio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think assuming money laundering was a fair assumption as the article only describes fraudulent activity and nothing else on the matter.

It’s really not, the idea of laundering cryptocurrency through Steam is ludicrous. 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.

I don't see how that's ludicrous. There's a lot of dirty money on both sides. One could easily imagine a scheme where items or accounts loaded with games bought with dirty BTC are sold for now cleaner fiat or crypto.

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

#197

Post by rosndo »

leppr wrote: post #196
rosndo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really not, the idea of laundering cryptocurrency through Steam is ludicrous. 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.

I don't see how that's ludicrous. There's a lot of dirty money on both sides. One could easily imagine a scheme where items or accounts loaded with games bought with dirty BTC are sold for now cleaner fiat or crypto.

This is the worst way imaginable to cash out dirty bitcoins. You can clean your cryptocurrency without paying Valve outrageous amounts for dirty fiat currency that you’ll just have to launder again.

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

#198

Post by phil21 »

lokar wrote: post #82

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding on the part of the pro-btc ppl here all saying "how is that fraud?" or "how is that steams problem?" If you run a business that can be used in a money laundering scheme, even if you are not a victim, you have a legal responsibility to try to limit/prevent that actually. The crypto crowd may not like that, but it's not up to them.

> The crypto crowd may not like that, but it's not up to them.

I think you'll find many of the "crypto crowd" strongly disagree with your assessment.

In fact, reality on the ground highly suggests it is indeed at least partly up to them.

This is probably where the fundamental "talking past each other" happens on forums like HN.

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

#199

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

anonporridge wrote: post #183
doomroot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything where the buyer doesn't leave 15-30 mins after making the payment or the purchaser is id'd.

This is why it's always been absurd to believe that standard retail purchases would be regularly done with layer 1 base chain transactions. You can't even say that you're ok with waiting for 1 block confirmation, because the time between each block is only an average of 10 minutes, with high variance. It's fairly common to experience over an hour between blocks, or as little as a minute. The security and confirmation…

> The only model that makes sense for bitcoin is the layer one base chain is a settlement network, with payment networks build on top that aggregate many transactions into one on chain transaction. Think OSI model for networking.

Do you think this applies to cyrptocurrencies that has faster confirmations/block generation? Or is only important when there is a lengthy confirmation?

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

#200

Post by m348e912 »

rosndo wrote: post #130
m348e912 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know what Gabe meant by fraudulent too. The whole idea of crypto is that if you send it and it's confirmed you can't get it back, which makes fraud (on the payers side) nearly impossible. You brought up the point about zero confirmations. Zero-conf itself is fairly reliable, it certainly doesn't account for 50% transactions being fraudulent. Bitcoin introduced replace by fee in 2016. In 2017, bitcoin tran…

I know this is about zero confirmation transactions because I know people who were deliberately double spending on Steam. > Zero-conf itself is fairly reliable, it certainly doesn't account for 50% transactions being fraudulent Of course it does. Someone using this to spend the same bitcoin multiple times will generate many times more transactions than a regular user.

You’re right and I take it back. If Bitcoin didn’t have replace-by-fee, then maybe it would have been a more accurate statement.
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