The summer sale on Steam is in full swing. Now a YouTuber has shown how to scam free games on Steam. And Valve, the company behind Steam, reacted quickly.
What kind of exploit is this? The YouTuber “The Spiffing Brit” explained in his video that one can add games to the cart on Steam with a trick and then not have to pay for them afterward.
All you need is the Chrome browser, a Steam account, and PayPal. The trick is that PayPal does not notice during the payment process when you add additional items to your cart from another browser tab, but the purchase price remains.
The YouTuber demonstrates this by placing a game for £0.71 in his cart and adding another game that he does not have to pay for during checkout via PayPal. The special thing is that the game he adds is not officially listed on Steam at all.
The video has been seen by more than 1.5 million people since July 3, 2024.
Expensive items from Counter-Strike can also be scammed in this way
What is particularly bad about this? You can also add games and products to your cart that have not been listed for a long time. This includes not only games that you are not allowed to purchase or see in Germany, but also items from Counterstrike 2 that have their own shop ID.
“The Spiffing Brit” explains in his video that Valve urgently needs to fix the problem, because otherwise one can particularly scam items that one can no longer officially obtain for free. This also includes outrageously expensive items from Counter-Strike that can be sold for several hundred thousand US dollars. This would not only completely disrupt the market, but some fraudsters could earn millions from it.
How did it end? In a very short edit note under his video, the YouTuber wrote: “Thanks to Gaben, Steam is fixed. I’m unsure about PayPal, but I’ll update this comment as soon as I know more.”
It is not known whether Valve contacted him or if he tried the exploit again. The exploit should definitely be closed now.
More on Steam: With the Steam Deck OLED, Valve has introduced a new version with an OLED display. Some games particularly benefit from the better display and HDR options. MeinMMO presents 12 games you should check out: 12 games you should definitely try on the Steam Deck OLED
