• Steam bans 18 million autogenerated accounts; activation now requires CAPTCHA
    19 replies, posted
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/bva1ip/all_18_million_accounts_by_an_account_generator/
cool. they'll find other ways.
What would the point of this even be, anyway? Just mass throwaways for trade scams/cheating purposes?
You can only ever mitigate the problem, doesn't mean it's not important to fight against it.
The reddit post is correct that they can't use it for any scammer purposes without paying five dollars on it. Which implies that those accounts purposes probably were for selling accounts with possibly limited time game giveaways on them. Humble Bundle, Steam, and other giveaways would likely be stored onto those accounts. If I remember correctly, Humble Bundle doesn't have any captcha for claiming free games either.
this means the workshop "FREE SKINS" spam is finally over
Generating unique Steam IDs to use, cheating in free to play games that don't require the $5 purchase minimum, anything else that doesn't have that barrier.
I remember the days of bots being used to buy and sell items in tf2 before the whole marketplace feature, seems like after that they just got used for nefarious purposes
that still happens... scrap.tf marketplace.tf lots of trade bots on backpack.tf
Are you the type of human that doesn't shower because eventually you will get dirty again anyway?
Finally, that seems like some good progress. On a cynical note though, was it that impossible to implement a captcha authentication step in the account creation procedure in the first place?
I find it funny that this is something that is certainly prohibited according to the Steam Subscriber Agreement and the developers are like "wtf volvo you cant do dis we hav legit users!!!!" how long until Valve sends a C&D letter to them?
let me have my lowkey valve rant damn it
This is crazy. To put it in perspective, if that 18 million is part of the estimated 90 million monthly active users that Steam currently has, that's 20% of those accounts just wiped out. However, there are some catches here already, after reading some of the thread. First, some accounts have been already reinstated by raising an issue with Steam Support. By default, Steam Support seems to say that the account in question was "banned by mistake" and just simply reinstates it. Second, there's already a generator out which automatically completes the CAPTCHA, so while a decent sized blow has been dealt, this will not be the end at all.
Nah, you just stopped paying attention (have some filler for more links)
to be fair, I stopped playing around that time they did the bot ban
Yeah, you stopped paying attention. And that's fine. It's an old fucking game. It's totally reasonable to think that something that was around six years ago in an already-kinda-old game would not necessarily still be a thing.
:^p Took the banter like a champ 9/10, would reply to again
I know some bots would rate up specific maps to the front page, where they would advertise their skin sites and what not. Also down-voting other maps in the process.
This is somewhat fixed since it was a huge issue a circa 2016 but this is what it looked like back in the days: https://youtu.be/fd_ria_6lHo
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.