It has come up multiple times in the Video Game thread but I thought I'd split this off rather than have it buried and revisited over and over again and people not being aware of the business model of these sites.
You can often find steam keys on places like G2A for cheaper than Steam or the publisher on release (or likely after release). But hopefully people are aware of what makes these places controversial. The prices are not lower merely because they are trying to be nice about it. They have had public clashes regarding fraudulent keys and chargeback scandals with TinyBuild, Devolver Digital, Ubisoft, etc.
Hopefully people are aware of where their money is going towards.
TLDR: Apparently a lot of their traffic is from money laundering and fraud.
11:05 - G2A is a global pawnshop that has a well documented history of selling stolen goods, is exempt from returning stolen goods when caught, and allows the robbers to repeatedly commit their crimes on their store. (And apparently their terms of services allows them to confiscate/profit the funds from accounts they find have been committing fraud).
http://kotaku.com/how-the-controvers...-so-1784669708
It’s cheaper because individuals are selling the keys, not Blizzard. But it also means you don’t know where the keys came from. Did someone simply have an extra key, or did they use stolen credit cards to defraud a game developer? There’s no way to know, and unlike other prominent marketplaces, G2A doesn’t automatically provide consumers with insurance for their purchases.
That “stuff” was a public fight that indie developer TinyBuild picked with G2A in late June. The Punch Club studio published a blog alleging the so-called eBay of game keys was “facilitating a fraud-fueled economy.” TinyBuild argued G2A made it easy to sell fraudulent keys obtained with stolen credit cards. In a story last week, I outlined how a hacker allegedly used stolen credit cards to run off with keys that he quickly turned into hundreds of dollars by selling them through G2A.
“Key resellers are very rarely fun to work with,” said Jericho in an interview with me recently. “Most people knew or at least were pretty sure of G2A and other key sellers’ involvement with fraud/illegal keys, etc.”
http://kotaku.com/g2a-scammer-explai...e-g-1784540664
MangaGamer, a localizer of adult visual novels, wanted to reward customers who’d bought games through their website with free Steam keys. Two years into the promotion, a hacker allegedly used stolen credit cards to fraudulently buy hundreds of games. The scam cost MangaGamer tens of thousands of dollars. Why’d the hacker do it? To sell keys on the controversial marketplace G2A.
“All of a sudden, we saw that there was this one IP address that was creating new accounts, buying new games, and trying to refund them,” said Pickett. “ [...] Why is someone buying 30 copies of the game? That’s not normal user purchasing.”
MangaGamer would ban one account, only to have another pop up. Different credit cards were being used to make the purchases and the volume kept increasing. It was whack-a-mole. At the same time, MangaGamer alerted their payment processor, the company that handles their online transactions. The payment processor makes their money by taking a cut from each sale.
As MangaGamer was trying to get a hold of what was going on, their payment processor would realize the credit cards in question were stolen and issue a chargeback fee to MangaGamer. (This can also happen with a disputed transaction.) The chargeback fee for MangaGamer was $30 per sale.