Reporting users on Steam appears to have a limit

I have had one phisher added on Steam for about an year or so, just because I was curious how long it would take for their account to become suspended or even deleted.

The answer to that question was.. Never? When they get to it? Sometimes? I hit the report limit before it happened, so as I was no longer able to report that Steam account I just ended up unfriending them.

I didn’t spam the report either, only did it once for each unique phishing link, and I would estimate that I only reported them 15 to 25 times. Maximum report amount was twice a day if two unique links were posted within 24 hours of time. I didn’t count the actual amount and this is only an estimate. And I can’t check the date when they sent me a friend request because their inventory is private and I often use the trade offer view on Steam to see the date when I accepted their friend request.

Last chat log of this particular case before I unfriended them.

Maybe this case was immune to getting suspended because the phishing link required “signing up” before giving you the phishing element. You had to register an account using email login, which never was used for verification emails or anything. After that you were automatically logged in to that user on the site. After which you had to sign up for any tournament they had listed, usually 3-5 different ones are shown. Only after clicking a tournament to sign up they asked you to login via Steam. So the actual phishing element was sort of hidden from public view and you had to work for it first. This particular Steam account was often seen as in-game for CSGO, almost daily. However they never played a single match of the game, either idled in lobby or had a program to fake in-game status.

Should I perhaps try this again with another Steam account? Get the real numbers, both reports and links posted, until I hit the report limit once again.

 

Reminder to anyone submitting reports against other Steam users

Only do it once per violation of the rules, EULA, TOS, or other agreement.

Spamming reports only causes longer queues for moderation and slows down the process that they go through each report which impacts the overall process of reports. And only report what you can confirm or even experience yourself, there is no reason to gather around all of your friends and ask them to report something they didn’t see or experience themselves.

Update

The new limit is 1 report per account as per my new testing.

 

Long delete period on Steam group used for phishing

I reported a Steam group which was only used for phishing on August 7th 2018 (and wrote a blog post about, Phishing site targeting gamblers).

I don’t know when the group started phishing it’s members or remember when the group was created but other type of groups that I have reported (neonazi for example) have gotten deleted way faster, usually within a week of report. But this group with phishing links sometimes on the group URL and always on the group announcements remained untouched for 10 months since my first report. And because of the long wait for deletion I think I managed to report the group 2-3 times after having waited several months since previous report.

Should of documented better the group creation date, active phishing link count and when the link was updated to bypass the URL filter. The only things that I know for sure are that the group only had one administrator user, no moderators and more than 5 unique phishing links in total. And the administrator user of the group had a normal Steam profile and played games regularly without any fear of getting banned it seemed.