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Valve removed a game called Abstractism from Steam after a "pretty well-known and experienced" Steam Community Market trader reported this weekend that he had been "scammed" by an object of his Community market. He thought – grateful that he was not paying enough attention to what he was doing – that he had purchased the Team Fortress 2 Strange Australium Rocket weapon, a rare weapon from Team Fortress 2 that can sell for more than $ 100. But it was actually an element visually identical but different from the abstract, and seemingly worthless.
It's pretty greasy, but as YouTuber SidAlpha breaks down in the video below, it's gotten even bolder, because developer Okalo Union has changed the details of the article, including the Picture and name. Clear the evidence of the scam – although the URL (https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/781600/Strange%20Professional%20Killstreak%20Australium%20Rocket%20Launcher) remains unchanged. Among the 190+ items available in the store were predictable stupid and useless – Pepe, Putin, I think I saw a copy of the Vintage Banhammer out there, and various other pieces of forage, flags, ASCII art, etc.
Other suspicions were sparked by the announcement of July 23 drops of the article in Abstractism, a so-called dynamic drop system with deviations croissants between the drops. "You need 15 minutes to get the first drop, 30 minutes for the second drop, 60 minutes for the third drop, and so on," wrote the developer. "You receive more rare items if your playing time is long (the 60-minute drops are better than the 15-minute drops) … The drops are reset on Friday and you should be in play to allow Abstractism to reset it. "
In other words, you must have the game running for extended stretches if you want to get the right things. That sounds pretty dubious in its own right, but what raised the eyebrows even higher was the high utilization of the "steamservice.exe" processor, which the dev claimed was needed to allow drops in objects . This led people to suspect that the real purpose was the cryptocurrency extraction, a theory that gained popularity when Okalo Union stated in response to a user review of Steam: "Bitcoin is obsolete, we currently use the abstractism to exploit only Monero coins.
Confusing things further, the drop item announcement includes a note suggesting that the user's response was a joke: "Abstractism Launcher and Abstractism Inventory Service are not minors of Bitcoin (and do not are not so minor). " [19659002] On top of all this, steamservice.exe would have triggered a Windows Defender warning that it was actually a Trojan that could be used to execute remote commands.
This is a scam at the very least – you do not duplicate expensive items from the Community Market of other games and you sell them at an exaggerated price by accident, and perhaps outright malicious. I emailed Valve to ask why, in light of this, he was allowed to stay on Steam. I did not receive an answer, but 20 minutes after I clicked the "send" button, it was removed, which is why you have no direct link with which one to play .
"We have removed Abstractism and banned its Steam developer from shipping unauthorized code, trolling content and defrauding customers with misleading gaming objects," said one representative. However, the Okalo Union account is currently still online on Steam.
The incident underscores (again) the inherent weakness of Valve's "everything goes" approach: the lack of moderation opens the door to unscrupulous developers who will profit from the popularity and the popularity of the platform to attack its users. Valve gets the credit for removing the game after it has been brought to its attention, but such software should not be approved in the first place.
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