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I think people may take this as a naive post considering a lot of this is conjecture - yes, there were valve employees that locked accounts based purely off watching this forum (Burton for example) but that was many years ago. I don't see any "low" digits being banned left and right, most "low" digits, if we are talking low I assume 2-3 and some 4 digits. Most of these accounts are being vac banned due to the player, not locked from steam. There are only around 100 or so within the 2 and 3 digit range that are still free from any ban - let alone new one's being locked. If there's anyone here that can attest to their 2 or 3 digit accounts being locked recently, please do so. I'm only speaking off of pure experience here, speaking to sellers since they began selling them back on KeyHunt.

The only "at risk" steam accounts, would mainly belong to sellers, active or past, and also people that are cheating ingame, or people that are trying to hijack. There are many russians on this forumn, alot of them recovering accounts without HL1, or OE. It i possible, but you need to know who is able to do it, and who isn't.

The most important rule of all is buy from a trusted seller, that's imperative. Most locked and retrieved accounts being reported, were retrieved from the seller themselves.

Unless you have information that (we) being collective past sythe users have, and have tried to collect over the past 10 or more years, it's difficult to say what steams agenda with low accounts is now.

 

The market is pretty much dead anyways, dont you think so? Whats the purpose of your post anyways? Do you wanna sell something? Or have you been scammed and want to report someone?

 

Naive? Conjecture? I wouldn't say something unless I was 100% sure of it. This is all based on my own, verifiable experience after locking many accounts and having been locked myself and having seen and dealt with many tickets recently. Nothing I've said hasn't been confirmed by Valve themselves at one point.

You bring up Valve employees coming to this market to lock accounts as if I made that claim, but I never said they do that. I specifically said locks through reports or automated locks after certain activity is detected. There's a high chance changing the e-mail address on a somewhat active account and then logging into it with a different IP address will get it locked. And account hijackers who log into an age-old inactive account with a blacklisted proxy/VPN IP address might get the account flagged, but not locked. They don't know this, though, and will sell it to a customer.

However, even if Valve doesn't stalk the market, there ARE people who go through the market and send in the reports themselves because they get a kick out of getting as many accounts as possible banned.

"I don't see any "low" digits being banned left and right"
Note, when I say "low-digit", I am generally talking about any 10+ year old account, so not just the niche few hundred very-low-digit accounts. You seem to think only 2, 3, or 4 digit accounts can get locked, but literally any account can get locked if reported properly. Though obviously, the older an account is, the higher chance there is of it getting locked, and recovering it will almost be impossible without at least the HL pack CD key. I have seen like 20-30 low-digit mains banned the past month after they were reported. My entire point is, if you buy a low-digit account, don't expect to keep it forever, so don't be in a rush to spend so much time and money on it if all it takes is one report to lose it all.

"Most locked and retrieved accounts being reported, were retrieved from the seller themselves."
You yourself said "most" which is my point -- you can never be 100% safe. There's always a risk buying accounts, especially if someone wants to desperately target you for some reason and masquerade you as a big account thief. Also, it's been worse as of lately since Valve is taking account theft a lot more seriously.

The market might not be as active as it once was, but many people still do buy low-digit accounts everyday with the expectation of keeping them forever, so they end up putting valuable groups and URLs on them and spending lots of money on games and levels. Is there something wrong with my post? I couldn't find one like it, and I spent a while writing it. It's also a nice source of information to have to reference. But I can understand how it might anger certain sellers and hurt their business. That's on them though for not being transparent with their buyers about the risks.

 

Yea I agree but its like saying "smoking is bad" in a tobacco store. Its not news, it has been against ToS of steam ever since steam existed, or am I wrong? I dig your post but I think it will soon disappear due to not getting bumped / not getting stickied like some other similar posts before and people will not notice it too much / care too much about it after some days. I also think quite some of the people who use these low digits kind of seeked the ban because they used their accounts for game-hacking / hijacked (other) accounts or participate in other shady activities. Hard to explain but not many of the "casual" steam users got banned afaik.

There is also nothing wrong about your post in general, its basically the same with csgo sales - I keep preaching that 90% of these dirt cheap accounts are hijacked but yet noone WANTS to listen because the prices are too good. And most people end up getting scammed rather than investing a bit more and buy from someone trusted who knows what they're doing. Some even after they added expensive stuff to their accounts, yet they still dont learn and grab the next 9.99$ account...