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Comment by lapetitejort | Hacker News Reader

Let's remember the convoluted money laundering scheme involving asset flips, card packs, gems, and Steam marketplace. What a mess that was.

1. Create an asset flip game with steam trading cards.

2. Generate steam keys and give to bots

3. Bots farm the cards.

4. Convert the cards to steam gems.

5. Buy legit cards with gems.

6. Sell legit cards on Steam Marketplace.

7. Buy sought-after game on Steam.

8. Sell game on the gray market for real money.

Let me know if I messed up any of those steps. It's been a few years.

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They are quite hard limiting the step 2. Seeing that even some bigger profile titles don't get enough keys to allow them be on quite well selling bundles like Humble Choice. At least not before they have generated enough organic sales.

Also gems have absolutely horrible conversion ratio. I think lowest I can find in my inventory is 6 gems per copy of game. You can sell gems for 0.30€ per 1000... So 167 copies. And accounts...

Not to forget that it cost 100 dollars I think to release game on Steam...

Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps? I mean steam keys cost money, bot farms, I doubt those gems have a very attractive exchange rate (it's a 'last resort' way to get rid of cards), buy / sell cards has Valve's cut, as does said game and the financial processors in between. It just sounds like a lot of effort.

Can people still trade guns outside of CSGO?

>Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps?

I suspect OP is being sarcastic.

I dont think they are. Money laundering, like any other financial service, costs money.

From a money laundering “user” perspective, would you rather have $1 million that will likely send you to jail, or $700k that you can spend freely without concern?

> I mean steam keys cost money

Not if you're the developer of the game.

Though there is still the upfront cost of publishing ($100/game I think?).

Generally money laundering schemes are very lossy, apparently 30-50% isn’t unheard of. This is because dirty money you can’t spend is nearly worthless, and because generally the people doing the actual laundering are agreeing to take on a large amount of legal and safety risk and demand to be compensated in proportion.

> Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps?

Very low, perhaps. Each bot cost $5 in order to trade. That's an upfront cost, and can be reduced if they buy their asset flip. A certain number of Steam keys can be generated free by the developer. Asset flip games might be near free, depending on the assets. Developer accounts cost money, but again that's upfront. Bots can farm in VMs. There's money "lost" on Steam and gray market trades, but that money never really existed. Yes, it takes lots of time, but it's automated and scales decently.

Money laundering is never 100% efficient.

I'm pretty sure that Valve's marketplace tax makes it much harder for low-margin scams to scale. You could definitely pull off an "exploit" like this today, but the main reason why it's not mitigated is probably because nobody is really getting scammed here. It's like Office Space, where the actual profits from this grift are so minute that the only way it would be profitable is if you stuck it out for several years.

I mean, to really make bank, what you need is for those digital assets to be worth something, right? So here's the plan, we just make a game that's really fun and market it so that it becomes super popular, trick people into playing it, you know? And then every day those rubes will be paying us money for digital assets we make for free, and for a 30% cut Steam will deposit it right into our bank accounts - clean, laundered cash. After five years or so, when they're starting to catch on, lose interest, we end ongoing support and just disappear off into the sunset with the money...

Count me in! I’ve got a bank account we can use to funnel the money

They'll never know what hit them.

Hahaha sometimes it does seem like scams are so clever and involve so much work that the people involved would be substantially more successful in almost any business.

There's an added benefit in that sociopaths get to hurt people in scams.

https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE

This might be a bit naive but if you end up selling on the gray market, have you actually laundered the money?

If you get fungible currency from it, then I think yes.

Laundering isn't about getting fungible currency (that's the input), its about converting a stream of illegally obtained fungible currency into a smaller stream of fungible currency that appears to government authorities to be a legally obtained.

Yes. Grey market games aren't illegal and people buy them with real money.

Can you give me an example of a gray market site that works by sending Steam gifts to accounts?

iirc g2a is the big one

I think G2A sends you a key of a physical copy, do they not? Haven't used them for a while.

It's seller dependent, you can get gift copies (frequently from hacked accounts or otherwise)

They do also sell keys, but most of the time the Steam gift is way cheaper.

For example the Garrys Mod Steam gift goes for ~9€ [1] while the key goes for ~16€ [2]

[1]https://www.g2a.com/garrys-mod-steam-gift-global-i1000000439... [2]https://www.g2a.com/garrys-mod-steam-key-global-i10000004391...

How do you sell the game on the gray market without selling the account?

You can buy it as a gift and choose not to send it to anyone, which puts it in your inventory until you choose to send it.

Note this is no longer possible, since 2017 you have to send it to a specified person at time of purchase.

Im pretty sure that if the person you sent it to doesn't accept the gift it gets put back into your inventory after some time.

Not since the change, no: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

I believe steam got rid of that feature some time ago to combat those grey market resellers.

Now people set up ways where the game is “gifted” to an email address where you copy the claim url and send that to the purchaser instead of a key.

My link below says they stopped doing gift to email address, has it been reinstated again?

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