Humans, we are very gullible. We trust almost anything even if it has no credibility or has an overwhelmingly negative reputation. It happens, but it shouldn't.

You shouldn't trust just anyone with your (hopefully) hard earned skins and knives. So, imagine this, you have a Blue Eyes White Dragon Yu-Gi-Yo card when this one guy with a spotless shiny red van asks if you'll like a $600 Gordon Ramsay signed chef knife. You immediately accept and give the guy your card and the guy throws a rusted butter knife and speeds off. This is essentially scam sites but with bots, and you're likely to recieve nothing in return.

Spotting scamming sites isn't always a walk in the park. They're usually well hidden to the point where there are no reviews on it, disguised as a different site, or they're very well written. The site the guide is going to focus on is the infamous csgo-exchanger site and the sites in it's family tree.

When you're trying to spot a scam site, first step is to do research. Google up the site and check forum boards and youtube videos. Some sites are quickly found out by scam victims, but other sites may not have been reviewed yet...

...When this is the case, you have to search for red flags. Some common red flags are:

• Terrible grammar or spelling.
  Most professional gambling/trading sites usually has someone spell check/grammar check and even fact check infomation. If a site has grammar of a two year old, or they don't even take a second to google the spelling of the word dog, then the site is probably not worth your time.
  
• Laziness
  Professional gambling/trade sites are usually not lazy when it comes to their Terms of Agreement, FAQ, or Support. If any site is cutting corners on any of these, like copying and pasting the same answer for a different, unrelated question in the FAQ, be alarmed.
  
• ERRORS
  Every now and again gambling/trading sites give errors. Maybe Steam is down, maybe trading is bugged, or maybe the bot is bugged. But this is a red flag to some extent. If you can, deposit an inexpensive skin and test the deposit function. If it works try the withdraw function. It's likely that the withdraw function won't work and will give "errors" but the deposit function will because as the scammer motto goes:
  

  Originally posted by some scammer probably:

  Why give skins when you can take skins!

and in the end, just use common sense.

Okay so you look for the red flags and you deem the site safe for trade. Then you get scammed. What should you do?

So first off you shouldn't goto the CS:GO discussions to complain, go to the discussions to warn others of the site, or goto the CSGO reddit, or even make a youtube video. There are even website rating sites where you can review sites like these. Use these resources to prevent others from being scammed. Don't just complain on the CS:GO discussions as said before because you'll just annoy people and end up being banned.

This is the end of this short guide. Just remember to research, search for red flags, and use your common sense!

• Look at the logos, some scamming sites have similar logos or steal logos from legit sites.
  
• Check the support and send an email. Most professional sites will have a bot that immediately sends an email that confirms that your email went through. Be cautious if you didn't get an email back.
  
• [Google Chrome] Use inspect to see if there is anything fishy in the code. Some scamming sites are badly coded in HTML.
  
• Remember the layout for one scamming site. Scamming sites (especially ones under the same family tree) will have the same layout. Be cautious if this is the case.
  
• Check their ToA (Terms of Agreement) for incorrect information or broken English.
  
• Check if they have useless counters. Some counters, like ones that count how many "people" are on the site at that moment, are only there to boost your trust in the site. Remind yourself why you're on the site. The only reason a counter of the amount of people on the site would be if you was gambling, not trading.

Thanks for reading this guide! Hope it helps! (And I hope you didn't get cancer from the artwork.)