Steam removes scam games impersonating Helldivers 2, Palworld, and other popular games

[Spotty]

Summary

Earlier this week Steam has delisted a bunch of games from Steam after scammers began changing the details of a bunch of their small indie games to impersonate popular games such as Helldivers 2, Palworld, Escape from Tarkov, and more.

The scam games were put on heavy discount and appeared in the Steam store where they were promoted on the discounts page and shown in search results on Steam for those games, appearing nearly identical to the genuine games they were impersonating tricking people in to purchasing the scam games and only discovering they were scammed when they installed and tried to play the game to find it was actually some crap 2D game instead of the game they thought they were getting.

The scam games were originally published on the 4th of November as Indie games under various different publisher names and various game names before their store page details were altered earlier this week. 

 

(Image source: Reddit)

 

 

People who bought these scams are eligible to receive a refund through Steam. Due to the way Steam pays developers it's unlikely the scammers will receive any money from Steam for the sales.

 

Fireb0rn posted a Youtube video which speculates that the goal of this scam was not to make money from Steam sales, but was actually to make money by selling the keys for these games on 3rd party key reseller sites such as G2A. Some people on Reddit noted that they have purchased the keys from G2A as Palworld and were still able to activate the key which displayed in Steam as Palworld. Despite the game being delisted from the Steam store and no longer purchasable, key redemption is still available for the scam games. The scammers likely generated thousands of keys for the scam games which they're selling on key reseller sites advertised as the popular games. Because the keys are still redeemable and show in the library as the popular games the key reseller sites likely won't issue a refund once somebody realises they've been scammed.

 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

On Thursday, a pair of fake Helldiver 2 games popped up on Steam, which is prompting the developer, Arrowhead Game Studios, to warn customers to be on guard. 
 

“THESE ARE FAKE. They are not made by Arrowhead but claim to be. We do not know what they contain, but they are not affiliated with us in any way,” the game studio posted in its official Discord channel.
 

According to SteamDB, the fake Helldiver 2 titles used to be indie games. But on Thursday, the scammers changed the titles, information, and screenshots to match the official Helldivers 2 listing on Steam. This included altering the game’s developer and publisher to Arrowhead Game Studios and PlayStation PC LLC. 

 

Quote

Developers of several games on Steam had changed the name of their games to Helldivers 2, completely altering their Steam pages, including the developer and publisher tags. And Helldivers 2 was not alone in being targeted by this scam. 

Palworld, Last Epoch and Escape from Tarkov were also impersonated, with the same strategy employed, and each Steam page for the fakes looking largely legit to a casual observer. At a glance, only the tiny number of reviews suggested something was not quite right. 

 

While games from different studios were altered, it seems likely this scam is being perpetrated by a single organisation, as the changes happened around the same time and the method was identical. The other games in these developers' catalogues also share a lot of similarities: they look like cheaply-made asset flips, and all of them are currently £39 or £49. 

 

Steamdb.info captures logs of changes to Steam store pages and shows where the scammers changed the titles, publishers, description, screenshots, and other details on the store page to impersonate other titles.

Here the store page for a 2D platformer originally called "Do Not Smile" was changed to impersonate Helldivers 2.

https://steamdb.info/app/2630550/history/

 

 

My thoughts

If you needed another reason to avoid grey market key reseller websites then this is it. You can't trust the copy of games you are buying from them are actually the real games.

 

It's crazy that these scammers were able to change the publisher and developer details to that of other developers. The developer and publisher pages that the games were changed to were the actual legitimate developer pages - it wasn't just a fake developer page they created with the same name. There should be a system in place where the developer/publisher account has to approve changes that list them as the developer/publisher to prevent this from happening.

 

You can't trust the Steam reviews on these scam games either. Fireb0rn's video talked about how the developer of these scam games are manipulating reviews for the games by setting an inflated high price for the game deterring most people from buying it, but setting an extremely low regional price for their own region (Russia) where the game is discounted down to the equivalent of less than a dollar, where the scammers are buying their own game from various accounts and leaving fake positive reviews allowing them to achieve a Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive review on the game before they change the store page to impersonate another game.

 

Since these crappy games were all uploaded back in November it shows this scam has been in the works for quite some time. I doubt it's going to be the last time we see this type of scam until Valve makes changes to prevent games from making these types of changes and changes it so if they remove a scam game they also invalidate all of the keys which have already been generated.

 

 

Sources

https://au.pcmag.com/security/104216/scammers-target-helldivers-2-buyers-with-fake-games-on-steam

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/several-steam-games-changed-names-to-helldivers-2-and-palworld-to-scam-players/

https://steamdb.info/app/2630550/history/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmIwBIs6FVk

https://www.reddit.com/r/Palworld/comments/1b3mhuz/um_i_think_someones_lying/

 

Edited March 6 by Spotty

[Eigenvektor]

Quote

If you needed another reason to avoid grey market key reseller websites then this is it. You can't trust the copy of games you are buying from them are actually the real games.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but imho buying gray market keys isn't better than downloading warez.

 

You have no idea where the license comes from, whether it will remain working and most importantly who you're financing by buying it.

[Mark Kaine]

ok, but i literally don't understand why steam allows identical names for different games... did the developers of "palworld" use the "i" for an  "L" trick?  

could be easily avoided by using a different font if so.

[RejZoR]

13 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but imho buying gray market keys isn't better than downloading warez.

 

You have no idea where the license comes from, whether it will remain working and most importantly who you're financing by buying it.

There are reputable sellers on grey market, some that I've been using for years without single issue. But you're always buying it as is and you're also not covered by protections from original game store, like for example you can't refund a grey market game you registered to Steam if you find it's not what you were expecting it to be. The deal is final. But I'm okay with that. Basically only game I sort of regret buying this way was Fallguys which I played just few times and then it was removed and transitioned to Epic Games anyway and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands because it's just boring AF even though I'm a huge Borderlands fan. But I accepted that loss and moved on. If price between Steam and grey is very small I'll always pick Steam directly, but in general I prefer GOG over anything because of their no-DRM policy which I really dig. If I buy games I expect not to be treated like a criminal by default and have constant problems with said stupid DRM. Had so many problems with legally bought games in the past because of DRM I hate it the most out of everything.

[BoomerDutch]

5 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

There are reputable sellers on grey market, some that I've been using for years without single issue. But you're always buying it as is and you're also not covered by protections from original game store, like for example you can't refund a grey market game you registered to Steam if you find it's not what you were expecting it to be. The deal is final. But I'm okay with that. Basically only game I sort of regret buying this way was Fallguys which I played just few times and then it was removed and transitioned to Epic Games anyway and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands because it's just boring AF even though I'm a huge Borderlands fan. But I accepted that loss and moved on. If price between Steam and grey is very small I'll always pick Steam directly, but in general I prefer GOG over anything because of their no-DRM policy which I really dig. If I buy games I expect not to be treated like a criminal by default and have constant problems with said stupid DRM. Had so many problems with legally bought games in the past because of DRM I hate it the most out of everything.

I love steam but there are moments I'm losing trust in steam because of this scams and oh lord if you actually installed it.

 

I hate this so much, cheaters, scams and DRM everywhere I fucking quit.

 

I'm done with online gaming and with their DRM. I'm avoiding them like plague.

[Spotty]

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

ok, but i literally don't understand why steam allows identical names for different games... did the developers of "palworld" use the "i" for an  "L" trick?  

could be easily avoided by using a different font if so.

It appears to be an identical name. I have no idea why Steam would allow games to have the same name as another game that is listed within Steam. Seems like a pretty big oversight.

Though, one of the games they were impersonating was Escape from Tarkov which isn't even available on Steam. https://steamdb.info/sub/943434/history/

Makes me wonder how the scam would work if the game they're impersonating isn't on Steam. Surely people buying Steam keys for a game that isn't on Steam would know it's a scam? Would the key reseller sites even allow sale of Steam keys for a game that isn't on Steam?

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, Spotty said:

Earlier this week Steam has delisted over 800 games from Steam after scammers began changing the details of a bunch of their small indie games to impersonate popular games such as Helldivers 2, Palworld, Escape from Tarkov, and more.

Just to correct this; it seems that 800 games were delisted from Steam at the same time when Valve removed these scam games from the store. It's not known if all 800 games that were delisted were associated with this scam or if it was just a batch of unrelated removals going through at the same time.

[Mark Kaine]

44 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Makes me wonder how the scam would work if the game they're impersonating isn't on Steam. Surely people buying Steam keys for a game that isn't on Steam would know it's a scam? Would the key reseller sites even allow sale of Steam keys for a game that isn't on Steam?

yeah, good question... i think some of these sellers simply don't care, and the buyers probably simply aren't aware what's on which platform.

 

also would be nice if all those articles would actually point out those things instead of just "this happened" (like the recent yuzu case wasnt layed out properly either by the outlets... we know it happened yeah, but why and how random emu dev can sit on $2.4m... everyone's guess lol)

 

but it is what it is these outlets are clearly neither capable nor interested in investigative journalism. 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Spotty said:

It's crazy that these scammers were able to change the publisher and developer details to that of other developers.

 

This is what I find weird about the story. Why is this possible? Is there not someone at Steam/Valve who actually verifies the business name when they first sign up for the developer program? What about the developer or publisher themselves who would clearly notice that something "they publish" isn't in their database.

 

[Avocado Diaboli]

46 minutes ago, Spotty said:

It appears to be an identical name. I have no idea why Steam would allow games to have the same name as another game that is listed within Steam. Seems like a pretty big oversight.

Well there are a growing number of games that recycle names. Granted, most of the examples off the top of my head have slight differences:

• The old COD Modern Warfare games used Arabic numbers while the new ones use Roman numbers
• The original Doom is named Doom (1993)
• Tomb Raider was retroactively titled Tomb Raider I after the reboot.

Other times, one of the two games with identical names isn't on Steam, like Prey, Saints Row or God of War.

 

So yeah, it's not a perfect argument to call out multiple games with the same name, since I couldn't find an example off the top of my head, but I'd wager that's the reason identical names are allowed.

[Eigenvektor]

1 minute ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Well there are a growing number of games that recycle names. Granted, most of the examples off the top of my head have slight differences:

 

There are certainly legitimate use cases for renaming a game, such a remasters, unexpected sequels or legal issues.

 

But that should require some kind of review process and likely be limited to published whose identity has been verified.

 

Considering the number of things I have to fill out to publish a new app on the Play Store these days, surely Valve could establish a similar review process, if they wanted to.

[strajk-]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but imho buying gray market keys isn't better than downloading warez.

 

You have no idea where the license comes from, whether it will remain working and most importantly who you're financing by buying it.

Hence why I use a secondary account where I have 70-90% off all games vs my currency + store all year round =)

The day Steam really starts cracking down on Gift Cards and Accounts usage outside the store country is when I'll really start feeling the pain.

 

Until then, my Turkish, Argentinian and Ukrainian cousins will keep sharing their games with me.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, strajk- said:

Hence why I use a secondary account where I have 70-90% off all games vs my currency + store all year round =)

The day Steam really starts cracking down on Gift Cards and Accounts usage outside the store country is when I'll really start feeling the pain.

 

Until then, my Turkish, Argentinian and Ukrainian cousins will keep sharing their games with me.

That's not my point. Yes you save money and the keys often work.

 

The important question is: are you financing organized crime?

 

(Which is why I said that's likely an unpopular opinion)

[will0hlep]

47 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

The important question is: are you financing organized crime?

Pretty sure we are doing that whether we buy games legitimately or not given how evil half the gaming industry seems to be (meant as a joke)

 

 

[Doobeedoo]

Scam world, not just such games but also known bigger companies games with their half assed expensive scams too.

[RejZoR]

4 hours ago, BoomerDutch said:

I love steam but there are moments I'm losing trust in steam because of this scams and oh lord if you actually installed it.

 

I hate this so much, cheaters, scams and DRM everywhere I fucking quit.

 

I'm done with online gaming and with their DRM. I'm avoiding them like plague.

Cheaters are hardly Valve's specific issue. Same for these scams, I'm certain that people who were scamed here will get their money back no questions asked. It's just odd that Valve allowed changes of game name and even publisher details to be identical to some other. And DRM is not Valve's domain. Steam in itself has some protections the way system works, but in the end it's up to game devs and publishers what they use or don't use. Most games have no protection outside of Steam itself, other who are so scared of their work being stolen usually use stupid Denuvo which often has bunch of performance problems.

 

At least for the last one you always have GOG where games are always without DRM because that's their policy. And I religiously defend it because they respect me as customer and I respect them as consumer and I have never shared any GOG game with anyone, ever.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

And DRM is not Valve's domain. Steam in itself has some protections the way system works, but in the end it's up to game devs and publishers what they use or don't use.

To add to this, here's a link to Valve's documentation for Steam-DRM: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

 

Quote

The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.

...

The Steam wrapper can and should be used in combination with other DRM solutions.