Steam gift cards have become an unequivocal symptom of something increasingly worrying: love scams

“I work in a store where we have Steam gift cards. Today an older lady came twice and bought cards worth $ 500. It turns out that $ 1,600 has been spent in recent days. How is it possible for someone to need so much money for Steam? “

The message published it A Reddit user that he showed his concern for the lady, and suspected that he was perhaps being scammed. Most like that it was happening just that.

It is a case of book of Scam of love.

One that over the years, of course, has adopted several forms and has ended becoming an epidemic. These types of scams usually have the same modus operandi:

1. The scammer creates a false identity to gain the trust and affection of a victim. Many of those victims are older people who feel alone and find a company (and hope of something more) in those conversations.
2. They usually use attractive profiles and create intense emotional relationships. The scammers dodge a personal meeting at all costs. They always live outside, on an oil platform, or work in the armed forces in some country in conflict.
3. Once they earn that trust, they request money under various excuses. For example, medical emergencies, trips or investments.

Precisely the way in which these payments require is what varies. One of the methods used by some scammers It is cryptocurrency paymentbut that is usually a complex way for older people and without computer knowledge. In recent years a method has especially imposed on others: Gift cards.

These gift cards – for example, of Steam, but also from Google Play or Netflix, among others – are a perfect way to request money because, in the first place, they are irreversible transactions, and secondly, because they allow scammers to hide their footprint since they are anonymous and very difficult to track.

A dangerously ideal means for scams

These cards are simply codes that are once held by the scammer can be converted into money in different ways:

1. They can resell them in gray resale markets online or in forums such as Telegram. They also usually resell them to attract buyers
2. They can redeem them in false or third -party Steam accounts, and then they can sell those games as gifts to other people. They can even recharge false accounts and then resell them to gamers interested in them.
3. They may also convert the balance of these cards into cryptocurrencies. Not directly, but through intermediaries They do accept gift cards as payment method for cryptoactive.
4. Or use those cards legitimately and buy games or digital content that they then give. That serves to appear that they are generous in later scams in those that use those gifts as bait.

In those scams of love, this type of Steam cards therefore become an ideal way to “facilitate” the victim to send money and do so in a very difficult way to monitor.

Older people are the favorite victims of scammers –They have seen cases by everywhere, some that go from Notable Simply extraordinary– And that’s why it is important to try to alert them.

Here the stores and shopping centers that sell these types of cards should have some type of policy to detect too frequent purchases of these cards and for Notify potential victims of this type of scams. For the rest of the users, a petition: do not buy gift cards through unofficial roads: otherwise, we are likely to contribute to the problem not mitigating.

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