Why I am losing faith in Steamrep

Disclaimer

Here we go

They are overworked

They are making arbitrary boundaries that hugely delay getting scammers banned

They do not give priority to severe cases

They have no early warning system

You basically have to get let yourself get scammed if you want to get a report through

80% of the victims will never even open Steamrep.com

Conclusion

I know this will upset some of the people working for Steamrep, and I am sorry for that. I thank you for your service but I still feel the need to write about these issues. I hope it will promote a healthy discussion in the community and am looking forward to your replies.It's been a while since I last wrote over TF2 scamming.Loads of stupid noob scammers added me over the months, most don't even have a working Paypal and insist that I should go first despite them not having any rep at all.As a good citizen I report even the smallest scams to Steamrep, a website that tries to track who is a scammer and who is not.It should work like this: A scam victim (or victim of a scam attempt) writes a report with proof, a responsible person at Steamrep takes a look at it and bans the scammer if the report is valid.But recently I have been losing faith in them, for various reasons. I will list them and use a current case I investigated to demonstrate these flaws.A while ago Steamrep had a warning up that you should search for open reports since they are hugely overworked and take ages to make decisions. Eventually this warning went away but they are still responding extremely slowly to reports.Case in point, the scammer who added me two days ago. He was using stolen Paypal accounts and therefore willing to pay first before receiving items. A few minutes after receipt of the items, Paypal would freeze the payments or the owner of the account would chargeback the payments. As I researched some more, I found an actual victim and immediately filed a report . I even personally commented on an admin's profile to make sure it gets handled quickly.Two days later, nobody has even looked at it. Meanwhile the scammer made around $2000 (that I know of).Due to the lack of the mentioned notice, people do not even know that visiting a person's Steamrep profile is insufficient. How should they know that the tiny link "Search SteamRep Forum" lets them to the open reports against this person.They open the Steamrep pages, see no warning or tag and carry on with the trade. In the case of our Paypal scammer, they would have found these: http://forums.steamrep.com/search/1846908/?q=76561198026342583&o=date Two days later, not one of these reports have been handled.Which brings me to my next point:Look at this report: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/scammer-alt-76561198026342583.43866/ It has all the needed information. Scammer, victim, transcript, screenshots for proof.But wait - recently Steamrep decided that it would be best if people would upload screenshots to their servers. Fine by me but this went completely unnoticed by almost the entire community. Even me, one of the more experienced traders, failed to notice it.A report gets usually handled by a minion that screens reports for their correctness. This may be necessary due to the volume of reports they receive. But instead of fixing the minor flaws themselves (like uploading the posted screenshots to the site, heck even a bot could do that), these minions only reply that people should upload the screenshots, often causing a delay of another day or two.Look at this report: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/76561198026342583.44110/ When he posted, my own report as well as the other victim's was already up there. So there were 3 independant reports of this guy being a scammer. But because the reporting person failed to record the original payment agreement, the minion just dismissed it as "Need more info". In a report of a very dangerous scam type and a $800 damage. How much more info do you need than 3 independent top tier traders reporting him to be a scammer.By blocking this report, the minion makes sure that no person with some actual knowledge of scammers ever sees it.If a person has one or more reports against them, this should show on their steamrep profile. Yes, innocent people may be temporarily annoyed by false reports, but then again making false reports is a bannable offense. You could have an explanatory statement like:This user is currently under review, please take a look at the open reports against him .Take a look at this failed report of mine: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/76561198036142699-Поиск.39860/ The guy randomly adds me to buy a game (I do not even sell games for money).He then:- Gives me a fake Paypal account email (was unable to received a mail on it)- Lies about having a verified Paypal account- Gives me a fake IP and a fake location- Refuses to send me a $0.01 payment to prove that he actually has a means of paying me for the game- Refuses to receive a "test" payment from me to prove that he actually has a working paypal account at allYet the minion in charge claims that none of this "is deemed as deceptive or fraudulent trade activity by SteamRep admins" (quoted from Steamrep FAQ ) and does not even give him a warning tag. So basically I had wanted to get him tagged, I would have need to trade him the game. Fuck that, if that is not the most transparent scam attempt, I don't know what is.This is technically not Steamrep's problem and makes a weak last argument, but it still one of the biggest problems of the scene. Even if the slow and painful process gets a scammer tagged, they will still be able to scam loads of people who do not bother to use Steamrep or who do not even know about it. There should be talks with Valve on getting the Steamrep API integrated into the trading window, so people see something like "Community Warning" when trading with a Steamrep tagged scammer.I am seriously contemplating not writing any more Steamrep reports. The time and effort it takes to create a report is completely wasted if the reaction time can be measured in weeks, not hours. Look at my previous reports: http://forums.steamrep.com/search/1847242/ Each of these reports take a lot of time. First you have to spot the scammer. This is easy, they come to me daily. But then you have to entangle him in enough lies and deceipt to warrant a report, proving that your intuition (and knowledge of red flags) was spot on. Even after doing all that, making screenshots and going through the hassle of formatting a report, you risk that it gets rejected for some stupid reason. And if it doesn't, it still takes days if not weeks for Steamrep to react. By then a good scammer has made $10.000 from the profile using the fake (or real) rep he received.If Steamrep wants to stay ahead of the game, they need to drastically change the way they operate. For example you could give people with at least X accepted reports the ability to hand out temporary warnings and/or bans. This will effect a tiny minority of innocent people but would be a huge step towards a quick reaction. Top tier traders are a popular target for scammers so they quickly learn how to spot them. It does not take me 2 weeks to know that the community needs to be warned about these people.