Key Change
blog.counter-strike.net
blog.counter-strike.net
all of that is to say that you aren't going to stop money launderers by cutting liquidity, you do it by identifying their behaviors and blocking them based on that.
OTOH, since "worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains" probably has at least some basis in reality, what's the story there? What other methods are criminals (presumably) shying away from now?
Random criminals are well advised not to trust their own judgement about crypto claims, nor their own prowess in operations security.
Keep in mind that eg lots of bitcoin exchanges have been hacked without any flaw in bitcoin itself. It's probably even easier to accidentally leak information, even if the underlying coin you are using doesn't.
Financial regulation has caught up to most of the exchanges and it’s not always easy to get cash out of a system (and that’s not even mentioning loads of shadier exchanges near-guaranteed insolvency)
(Of course if you want to liquidate to non-trivial amount of money, you're probably not interested in speculation)
If you like your job, your cost looks very different from doing an equally demanding job you hate. The emotional cost is real and can have long-term effects on your health.
Plus of course clicking stuff on your computer is something you can do in your time wherever you are as long as you have an Internet connection. Working for 1-2 hours at a gas station (or McDonald's or whatever) requires a fixed schedule and commuting, not to mention that you'd likely need to agree to a minimum number of working hours and are unable to just skip it whenever you want.
"Why don't you do this other form of unskilled labor for minimum wage instead" is a legitimate question when the current alternative is time consuming and they're struggling to make ends meet. Not so much when it's something they do for fun every now and then while already holding a job that pays above minimum wage.
the thing to remember here is that money launderers are looking to push a lot of volume. they care about the volume of clean money they can get, even if that means negative margins (you are "paying" for the service). i'm guessing market making in crates is not a very high volume kind of service but I might be wrong!
I agree that this change only complicates the process and probably doesn't stop them. Launderers are just going run the numbers (since drop rates are public), and at the scale they're operating at they can probably rely on expected values. If the new margins still work for them they'll just unlock boxes and sell the skins directly. And I'm inclined to think the margins will still work, since the market kind of naturally prices items around key costs.
Valve doesn't need to stop money laundering. They just need the money launderers to go elsewhere. (And they need the regulators to leave Valve alone.)
I used to love playing CS. I tried recently playing again, but after 10 minutes of witnessing all sorts of cheating, I had to stop. Cheaters just killed the game for me.
That said, taking time for detection to be developed and not wanting to give live feedback to cheat developers are also good explanations for waves.
CSGO is free to play. If you get banned, you only have to register a new Steam account...
The main problem is that VAC can be better but not without elevated privileges aka borderline rootkit and that's not gonna happen
I would encounter someone who was clearly and obviously cheating only once every few weeks.
If you must use it then you can try and regain some control but I doubt it really works:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windo...
When I started this time I sucked. I was constantly on the last places. As time has passed I think I have become better. Nowadays I am normally in the middle rank.
I still suck though, that's why I usually play death match. It gives me the best time/enjoyment ratio.
It never occurred to me that some ppl could be using autoaiming or similar cheats.
For me, a very casual player, it is very enjoyable.
Skill-based Matchmaking doesn't help, flat out. People smurf. I used to think smurfing was this thing that you'd rarely run into, but then I found out that my roommate smurfs on Apex. At that point, another person in the room said "yeah, I've done that". In these games that are insanely cheap or free; its rampant. I legitimately think that smurfing should be a bannable offense, but I'm not aware of any companies that take it seriously (some have said that its against ToS, but do they apply the same detection heuristics to it they do for actual cheaters?)
So the motivation is to feel good at winning against not experienced players?
Contrast online matchmaking systems that take your assessed skill level into account. These are certainly... widespread. I don't understand why.
The design goal of such a system is that, no matter what your skill level is, you win or lose at a rate indistinguishable from chance. Are you getting better at the game? Doesn't matter; your win rate is constant. Are you getting worse under lack of pressure, since nothing you do affects your performance? Doesn't matter. Nothing you do can affect your performance. Your win rate is constant; the system will seamlessly swap in weaker players to play against you.
If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before. If I'm getting worse, I want to see worse results.
All the time. They teach people to play; they do stunts like playing against 5 people at once; they sit in the park and take all comers.
If you want to prove you're good, go and fight someone who's known to be good. But that generates information for other people, not for you. If you want to determine how good you are, you need to fight a lot of different people.
They teach people to play -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393157
> If you play with a friend who has a low rank, it is much easier to create a free now account (that will start in a low skill group) than it is to obtain one for them which is already in a higher skill group.
They do stunts like playing against 5 people at once -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21394927
> you can essentially carry your entire team to victory because your skill level is so much higher than the enemy. You get to fuck up a bunch of newbs and win the game, while your team mates are drooling at spawn.
They sit in the park and take all comers -- I've been pushing this angle myself:
> If you want to determine how good you are, you need to fight a lot of different people.
I'm arguing that the idea of matchmaking according to assessed skill level is inherently flawed, and smurfing is a natural workaround to this self-inflicted problem.
Actually, if you are improving you will do better than even, if you are getting worse you will do worse—those are the signals for upward or downward movement. When you plateau it should be a coin flip.
> If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before.
While you are improving, you will. Roughly, your win rate reflects the derivative of skill.
This is why games using those matchmaking system will give you either MMR (Match Making Rank) points based on you performance. When you win, you "earn" points, and will face stronger opponents (to keep you around 50% victory). And when you loose you will "spend" points to go back to 50% victory on average. The process is very similar to ELO in chess.
So you have a visual indication that you are on the right or wrong path and where you are in terms of skill level compared to other players.
Most game also offer some vanity system, where your character is displayed differently according to the skill level you have reached (Eg: bottom 20% is bronze, 20%-40% is silver, 40-60% is gold, 60-80% is platinum, 80-95% diamond, top 5% is master, and top 1000 players overall are grand master). Players then fight to reach the next level, still with around 50% win-lose rate until they reach the very top or the very bottom).
If you win you get a higher ranking.
> just destroying a bunch of new players? Surely that must get boring after a while?
Smurfs never play more than 4 or 5 games versus new players. The matchmaking system doesn't match a guy who has 100% winrate over his 20 first games with a guy who has only 30-50%.
A) You can play a game at your actual skill level, which requires your team to communicate effectively and play together. This requires someone to take the lead and coordinate the other players. That just doesn't happen in drop in games. It is incredibly not-fun and frustrating to be playing decently yourself, but be anchored by incompetent team members. You get guys who want to play their own way, or just aren't interested in "taking orders". Plenty of arrogant dudes that won't listen to someone that is a lower rank.
B) Play at a level where you can essentially carry your entire team to victory because your skill level is so much higher than the enemy. You get to fuck up a bunch of newbs and win the game, while your team mates are drooling at spawn.
B is definitely more fun. Especially when the people smurfing can get their fix of A in an organised match with an organised team, outside of match making.
I.e. most of the times there are 2 good guys, 2 mediocre guys, and 1 beginner in each team. I've had a lot of actually fun 15:15 games there.
For some reason, Valve thought that this was a problem. And they modified the matchmaking system in a way that forces the MMR distribution to be a bell curve from the outside. It's not known what exactly they do, but from tracking sites it seems like the distribution starts to "deform" over the course of a week and then gets "squished down" again.
As a player, the effect this has is that 1. accounts at the upper ranks (Global Elite/SMFC) decay really hard, like if you have an account that is GE and you don't play on that account for 3-6 months, you'll be like MGE afterwards. My main account got actually re-ranked from GE to MG2 after they shifted the ranked distribution - after which I won, and this is not an exaggeration, 38 games in a row, and still kept like 75% win rate until the account was GE again. The other effect is that it takes way too long to rank up now, it used to be that if you won 6 games in a row you would very likely rank up, now it can take easily double that.
Put those two together, and you've got a million smurfs obviously. Because anyone who just bought 10 accs for $70 during a sale (and believe me, many, many people did that) can just rotate around accounts and let them decay again once they're too high to smurf on.
Add to that that there is nothing to do once you're GE, there is simply no higher rank, and yeah it's no surprise the game is full of smurfs.
To make things worse, now that Trust Factor exists you can't even compare experiences anymore. If a new player comes to me and says oh I only play against cheaters or smurfs, I can't even give him a way for it to get better. We have no idea how Trust Factor works, and if you're a new player with a bad Trust Factor... what are you gonna do? You have nothing to look forward to. Prime barely even means anything anymore (not that it ever did, but at least it was a small hurdle), and there's no given way for you to increase your Trust Factor.
Are you saying that people spend a lot of money to buy multiple Steam accounts (that have CS:GO on them), so that they can slowly rotate which account they use for playing, so that they avoid gaining ranks and being matched with players that are as good as them, so that they can keep dominating lesser skilled players every time they play?
This is also something that happens in pretty much every multiplayer game with skill based matchmaking that exists. However, other games are much better at mitigating this. In LoL for example, your MMR doesn't decay at all. It does get soft-reset once a year when the new season starts, but that reset is quite soft and you can't "stack" multiple years of resets on top of each other. If you had top 1% MMR in 2015, you still have top 1-2% MMR. All games could do more to prevent this, simply by changing how their matchmaking works, but CSGO really takes the cake in terms of requiring an absolute minimum amount of effort, plus actually "forcing" people to smurf unintentionally, just because they took a long break from the game. It's comical at this point.
Maybe something like a hidden quick ranking would help. I.e. something trivial like average kill/death ratio, numbers of headshots, ...things that make smurfs annoying. And then match you still according to the real rank, but put people with the same hidden rank in the enemy team.
Those still exist, but they are a tiny minority compared to smurfs who just decay. The simple problem is this: Losing on purpose is extremely boring and very time consuming. Having to spend 50% of your time on an account intentionally losing just so you can win a few easy matches is more annoying than just playing on a higher ranked account.
>Maybe something like a hidden quick ranking would help.
If I'm being cynical, Trust Factor is exactly this kind of hidden rank system. Which is probably why they're seeing decent results from it. The problem however is how do you distinguish between a talented player and a smurf? Someone who simply played a lot of 1.6 or Quake will have exactly the same indicators as a smurf or even a cheater.
Doing this results in very fair matches if we simply define fair as "both teams have a decent chance of winning", but it completely kills any meaning of ranked progression. If someone is "DMG", that has a completely different meaning combined with a very high hidden rank or a very low hidden rank. It's literally worlds apart. And that's exactly what we're seeing with Trust Factor of course, low trust factor matches are worlds apart in skill (whether that's actual skill or cheats) from high trust factor matches.
What would really help is simply abandoning the idea that the ranked distribution has to look like a bell curve, removing MMR decay, and showing some sort of ranked points after reaching GE. That would get rid of 80% of smurfs easily. Even better would be a ranked system more like LoLs system, so you can decay people's rank without decaying their MMR. Plus ideally some sort of way to recognize when players perform way above or below their expected skill level, and quickly adjusting their MMR. (For situations where people buy accounts or buy boosting services. Some people think that boosting should be detected and then the adjustment should be extra slow - but that's just stupid really. It's not going to stop anyone from boosting, it just means the booster is going to destroy more games. Detect boosting, and rank them up really quickly, and then detect when someone is playing really badly, and rank them down really quickly. That keeps the amount of destroyed games at a minimum.)
No. Elite players are less common than hackers. And these people were actively cheating and not even pretending to not be cheating. Twitchy aiming, insta lock-on head, could go around a corner and kill 4.5 people on the other side before going down.
A lot of people mistake cheating for really good players. But if you watch a lot of competitive FPS games, even the pro players do not have perfect aim and ESP. They can't round a corner and frag a whole team who is facing the correct way waiting for them.
It is seriously everywhere. League of Legends has a cheating problem. Call of Duty has a cheating problem. Fortnite, PUBG, it is all of the major games.
Unfortunately, I think I'm just done with competitive online gaming. Time was you could join a server, play with the same group of people. They would kick anyone with ping over 50. Anymore, there are too many people playing over WIFI with horrible connections teleporting around. And too many people paying $5/mo to get a cheat engine.
Now you get placed with random people you'll never see again, a fifth of whom it feels like are cheating anyway.
No it doesn't. Cheaters are incredibly rare in ranked games.
Cheating is an easy way to get your account banned super fast and creating a new account is a huge time investment.
You won't find any experienced people saying cheating is a problem in that game.
In hindsight, this money could've been better spent, but I won't blame my teenage self for enjoying a little bit of financial freedom.
Of course, you also get those really rich kids that only want to brag, others that buy in order to resell and profit from it, etc.
Sometimes you spend some money on the game simply because you really like it and want to support the developers.
I occasionally buy skins for fighting game characters simply because I enjoy looking at those skins (more than I enjoy the defaults). Heck, some characters are played exclusively because of cool skins (e.g., Blanka Chan).
I see no problem spending money in something that just looks cool if you're getting your entertainment value from the game. It's the same reason why you would buy that cool shirt you saw on the internet: you already have plenty of shirts, you don't actually need one more, but it would be cool anyway.
I realize you can buy skins directly on the steam market, and avoid the whole random factor, but then you're just paying whatever the market rate is for "coolness" plus the costs of all the other people who did the key/box buying. Plus there is the whole "condition" mechanic, so the skin you get might not even look the way you actually want.
Like I said, people can do whatever they want, but to me its just silly. When you add to that the fact that Valve actively* stops people from playing on custom (i.e. private) servers with modded skins available and it just seems like shitty anti-consumer behavior.
Boxes are obtained for free by simply playing the game. You don't really need to buy boxes unless you want some specific one from a past event that is not available through the game anymore, but someone got it back then or if you want boxes at a faster rate than the regular gameplay provides. But you need to buy a key to open it, however.
Also, a given kind of a box contains one of the finite number of items. I think the idea is that if you get a duplicate that you don't want, you can either trade it with a player who doesn't have it for a skin that you want or sell it on the steam marketplace (so you can use that money on a skin that you actually want).
I get the mindset, that's how I felt before in every other game, but I'd consider my $50 of skins money well spent even if no one else could see them.
But I don't really get your hangup on this. If you're going to take that stance, it's almost like what's the appeal of anything aesthetic? Some people like it. Do you think it's ridiculous when someone buys the metallic paint option for a car? Or goes with a different graphic on a skateboard? Or chooses a camo pattern jacket instead of a gray one?
At least that is why I buy the occasional skin that looks nice to me.
Some people buy expensive watches, cars, clothes etc only to be able to impress other people who care about that sort of thing.
When your circle of friends exist in a game, and they care about that sort of things, you buy this stuff to show off since there's no one around to notice your Rolex.
The same kind of person who thinks it’s impressive that you swiped you credit card a few more times than they did for the same society? Rolexes, branded suits, designer dresses, branded smells, it’s all the same. Products that are effectively the same as cheaper alternatives except the are more expensive and carry along with them the awe of someone taking on that higher expense. That is to say, everyone, including you. You just aren’t conscious about it in the contexts where it happens.
Also, “Timmy can’t join our clan, he’s a cheap-ass who can’t even afford the flaming bucket helmet we all wear.” Is a powerful sales pitch.
At one point the Domino's app was being used to facilitate credit card fraud: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/nyregion/pizza-orders-rev...
I never saw that original Domino's article but I can vouch for its complete validity and accuracy. I'm sure carders are still checking CCs on Dominos too. CC checkers are a hot commodity and carders are creative people. RedBox is another good example like Domino's.
Anecdote: In 2008, Obama's donation gateway was also heavily used. I don't believe that was nearly as reported, though.
Years ago I bought myself a gaming PC this way, selling all my TF2 and CSGO skins. Yes everyone takes a cut (Valve, trading site, Paypal or whatever payment service you use) but it's still the best way to turn your digital items on Steam into cash
Jack Criminal buys a bunch of keys from Valve with dirty money. Possibly Jack Criminal passes the keys off to Jane Criminal's account to muddy the waters. Jane or Jack Criminal puts the keys up for sale on the marketplace. Harry Gamer happily buys the keys.
Every single transaction in that chain involves a criminal, but Harry isn't a criminal and is getting what he wants. The exact quote is "At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced." It's not that every individual transaction cheats someone, it's that they're happening in order to perpetrate an overall fraud.
Transferring value between people requires a money transmitter license, which in turn requires a credible anti money laundering program.
edit: I'm dumb. didn't read it through.
Pre-existing CS:GO container keys are unaffected–those keys can still be sold on the Steam Community Market and traded.
Reference: https://youtu.be/6ktvE2vfxSQ?t=69