'Factorio' is another game that was being hit by key scammers

In another case of scammers trying to buy keys with often stolen credit cards to sell on websites like G2A, the developers of 'Factorio' have written about their experience with it (and other stuff too).

To recap, here's how it all works:
- A purchase is made on a developers website using a stolen credit card, hacked paypal etc.
- The purchaser sells the key on the grey market within a couple of days.
- Some weeks later the owner of the credit card notices, and issues a chargeback to the developer.

This happens to a lot of developers and more and more are speaking out about it. Those effectively stolen keys end up on grey-market stores like G2A.

Samsai and I have both written about this before, but here's a point we never considered: When the chargebacks happen, the developers end up getting an extra charge. As the Factorio developers have explained:

QuoteOn our side, the cost is very large, each chargeback costs roughly $20 in fines, effectively a negative sale, and we were seeing upwards of 10% chargebacks on our website transactions. Also each chargeback notice had to be handled on a case-by-case basis, at one point I was spending 12 or more hours a week dealing with individual purchases.

That's a lot of time and money wasted because of, for lack of a better word right now, assholes.

This is something I've seen people say constantly about it too "just revoke the keys!", they speak about that as well:

QuoteA common saying I hear is that this isn't a problem, because 'The devs just revoke the keys', well that simply isn't true, we don't get notice of a fraudulent payment right away, it can take upwards of 8 weeks for the chargeback to be issued, at which time the key is obviously going to be already sold for profit and forgotten. We still revoke these keys, often to the dismay of the purchaser.

The developers did find a solution, as they have ended up going with the Humble Store widget as it has built-in fraud prevention.

This is why I only ever buy from itch.io, GOG, Steam or Humble Bundle/Store.

By doing so I ensure the developer and the store service get correctly paid. There's probably a few other legitimate stores out there, but I don't bother with any of them. I don't need to, as all of those sites constantly do massive sales I have no need to go elsewhere. Just the other day I picked up another copy of Mad Max for only about £5 from a Humble Store sale!

Just something again to keep in mind before you go buying those $1 keys from random websites.

If you haven't ever played Factorio, I can highly recommend it. I wrote some previous thoughts up on it here.

Thanks for the link fedso! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.