What is Trade Protection? Counter-Strike's New Anti-Scamming Measure

Counter-Strike skins market is one of the largest of its kind. With a market cap of $4.2Bn, some of these in-game cosmetics cost tens of thousands of real world currency. Consequently, scams are a major issue for CS skins.

As a measure against such scams, Valve has announced Trade Protection: feature to recover stolen inventory items. This feature, currently available for CS only, will be rolled out for other Valve and non-Valve titles in the future.

What Is Trade Protection & What Items Are Trade Protected?

Any item traded via Steam (after trade protection was implemented) will have the "Trade Protected item" status for 7 days.

A Trade Protected Item in Steam inventory (credit: Valve)

While these items can be instantly equipped in-game, they will be highlighted in the Steam inventory with a yellow badge and can't be:

• Consumed: Cases, Souvenir Packages, and Sticker Capsules can't be opened. Stickers and Charms from trades cannot be applied . (Thanks Anomaly 3 for the explanation)
• Modified: Singular Skins can't be modified i.e. applying/removing stickers/charms/name tags
• Transferred: Can't move skin to storage

During these 7 days, the trade featuring the protected items can be reversed by either party, meaning they will be returned to the sender.

Essentially, in a situation where users fall for a scam, or lose control of the account, they can recover the account and reverse unrecognized trades thus recovering items.

How to reverse a trade

Only a trade with protected items can be reversed. To reverse a trade:

• Log into your steam account
• Navigate to Profile > Inventory
• Under the "More” drop down, navigate to Trade History
• Click on the “Recover the account and items" link
  • The reversible trades will be highlighted with a yellow bar and a message “These items are trade protected until <Date>”
• Select the trades to reverse
• Confirm the action

Once the trade is reversed, the account reversing the trade cannot trade or use the community market for 30 days due to security concerns.

Check the Steam FAQ for a more detailed explanation and possible scenarios.

Measure Against Scammers OR a New Way to Scam?

The Trade Protection feature does improve the account security provided by Steam. Moving forward, API scams (stealing inventories via phishing links) would be less effective, even obsolete.

Even if you lose your account, you can recover it via Steam Support in a matter of days, if not hours, and recover the inventory along with it.

However, a huge chunk of the CS market largely runs on cash trades. Especially the high-tier expensive skins are sold against cash. Moving forward, such transactions would carry a heavy risk, and buyer and seller would be skeptical of any such trades. A bad actor could simply reverse a trade they have received money for, leading to a new type of scam.

The feature also limits third-party marketplaces that rely on trading for their operations. Especially for consumables (i.e. cases, capsules, stickers, charms etc.), trade protection locks them for 7 days, so users will turn to Steam Marketplace (i.e. community Market). Even for mid-tier skins whose price fall under Steam's credit limits, these will largely be bought and sold on the community market.

For Valve, this feature not only improves security for their users but increases the transactions on Steam, thus bringing in more money. Irrespective, the feature is a solid addition and one of the biggest changes to item trading yet.

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Featured Image Credit: Valve

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