First of all, anyone who has spent a considerate amount of their time on steam probably stumbled across the trading community. A beautiful place if everyone acts fairly and in a mature way and a good way to even make friends. Me personally, I spent about 5 years on 2 accounts trading.

What motivated me to create this guide is the downside that comes with having a decent Steam inventory - The scammers, the good and the bad.

Especially in the golden ages of CS-Trading I stumbled upon countless of scams.
These go from PayPal selling methods, Steam Credit, to fake gambling sites, phishing and in some cases straight up account hijacking.

To avoid these scams you have to be informed about some things:

Most of the time when someone wants to trade, they are interested in a certain item of yours. Know what your items are worth and if something seems suspicious about the way they try to overpay, it probably is suspicious.

People inviting you to new gambling sites are also probably just gonna take your items, no matter how professional it looks. They can even go as far as showing you how they can rig the outcome of something, it's still fake. They aren't really interested in giving random people profit.

Also be very careful with cashing out your Items via Paypal; There is a high risk because you are gonna send them an empty trade for money in private cases, which can easily result in a scam.

Always know your inventorys worth and be concious. Some fishy-bot looking accounts are obvious but some go to far meassures just to rob you. Be careful !

Often times it feels like Steam/Valve does not care about the community, but they do to some extend.

After being tired of getting several friend invites a day(all scammers) I decided to actually talk to one. He tried a fake gambling site method. I let him struggle to explain to me whats going on until I revealed that I am just wasting his time. I am not sure but I think he even insulted me.

Kinda laughing about it and making him feel guilty I just copied the chatlog and send it as a report ticket.
Ironically enough I got the news: Steam took action against the violation.

This made me want to share the news: If someone tries to scam you, simply take the evidence, report the profile and get their accounts (trade)banned. It may not change the fact that people will still scam you, but it will atleast stop some people from scamming others, which is ultimately a good thing

I'd like to apologize for any grammatical errors or typos since english is not my first language. However I wanted as many people as possible read this. I hope you somewhat enjoyed the ''poetic justice" and maybe learned something aswell !