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Comment by abnercoimbre | Hacker News Reader

Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. They also verify address, payment method etc. to reduce double-dipping.

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> Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier.

Pre-creating "sleeper" accounts is a common way of circumventing this, though it does require a degree of long term thinking/planning.

Oh yeah I remember reading that in a book about botnets. Valve can only do harm reduction here, but calculating actors will seep through.

Then s/g still applies

There's probably more to it than that, and Valve just isn't telling us all the details.

It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.

It's certainly possible that Valve is not being truthful about the lottery. (Would that be illegal for them to do ?)

>You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.

>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."

It's not just an account with an age, they have to have made a purchase. And shipping address + payment info also help eliminate duplicates.

I guarantee you there are lots of sleeper accounts out there that have made "a purchase", which could be less than a dollar. It definitely helps to require any purchase at all, but if they were trying to be semi-thorough that requirement would look more like $100 in purchases.

I thought sleepers Steam account was already a thing to work-around something - matchmaking limitations in Dota 2 maybe?

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