Valve is not interested in illegal trading with CS:GO skins and has disabled over 2800 bots. They had some valuable skins with them.
Which bots were deleted? Valve has disabled many bots on Steam that are directly connected to the popular site for CS:GO skin trading “OPSkins”.
High losses: Along with the bots, their inventory contents were removed. It is estimated that the skins in the bots’ possession were worth a total of 2 million dollars.
Trading website circumvented Steam rules with bots
7-day protection: Valve activated a feature in March that makes CS:GO skins tradable only seven days after acquisition. This was likely aimed at protecting buyers from fraud.
ExpressTrade not allowed: They have now disabled many bots because the OPSkins website offered an ExpressTrade feature. A free service that allows users to trade skins directly with each other. No sales listing needed to be posted online; it was presumably immediate and without delay with the help of bots.
He did the Math: A Reddit user has calculated and compiled an estimate. It is believed that 2843 of the removed bots had CS:GO items in their inventory. Altogether, they had 1.5 million tradable items in their backpacks. These are worth about 1.9 million dollars.
There was a warning: Valve disabled the bots on June 21, but reportedly sent a cease and desist letter to OPSkins operators as early as June 6, shortly after they launched the ExpressTrade feature.
Quickly warned the customers: OPSkins immediately sent a notice to its users to remove their items from the OPSkins inventory to avoid loss.
Even other third-party providers are said to have already used ExpressTrade to circumvent Valve’s rules.
Future for skin traders? OPSkins states that they will not stop their service now. The operators are already looking at other games for which they plan to offer a marketplace in the future.
