My Steam profile, including the inventory with some Gift Games, is public.

I get a few friend requests now and then from profiles that have that exact text (or very similar) as their profile info:

Hey, it’s my alt account and I added you since saw you got some steam gifts I am interested in, I can offer you some games or other value items such as tf2 keys, so if you can add me to discuss, I would appreciate it, thanks, I am ready to go first, and can add you from my main account if we trade

Sometimes even with

I avoid posting comments because of the risk of getting flagged by the system as a scammer.

So why do these people/bots want the gift games? Are they trying to scam me, are they trying to scam others with the games? Or do they want to optain the games so they can sell them on their own 3rd party site for a profit?

Has anyone gone through with such a “trade”, I’m tempted to try it with a cheap game that I don’t need, just to find out how the scam works…

Edit: All gifts except for one are still available in the Steam store. The only one that is not, is a DLC, a song for Rocksmith. I doubt that this is the only reason, especially since most request have the same copypasta in the profile info.

  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
    5·
    18 days ago

    They’re wanted because steam stopped them. So no new inventory-gifts since back then. And like every good that’s finite and decreasing in quantity, prices go up for collectors.

    Last one I sold went for 80 bucks (batman telltale) even though you could’ve bought the game for some bucks in the same store at the time.

    Still got my witcher3-goty sitting there and waiting 😁

    So yeah, they probably tried to scam you to make some moneyzs out of - to you - worthless stuff.

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.bascul.in
    3·
    18 days ago

    I had a Portal 1 gift lying around on one of my alts, it was bought quite early and it wasnt trade restricted. Had way too many unnecessary requests about it and even surpassed my main account’s spam, so I just gifted it to a friend. Is it a collector thing? idk, maybe.

    I’d highly reccomend hiding Steam gifts from your inventory though if it annoys you.