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For more information on trading, refer to the Steam Item Restoration Policy and the Recommended Trading Practices article.
You can create and send a trade offer from two places: the Trade Offers page within your Inventory or from a friend’s profile.
To send an offer from your Trade Offers page:
To send an offer from a friend's profile:
You'll then need to confirm the trade offer. If you're using a Mobile Authenticator through the Steam Mobile App on your smartphone to protect your account, you can confirm via the app. Otherwise you'll receive a confirmation request via email.
Steam items, in-game items and extra copies of games (referred to as Steam Gifts) are tradable. To be sure if an item is tradable, please go to your Inventory and select the item and read the item details. The “Tags” section will indicate if it is tradable or not.
After logging in to your account, hover over your profile name in the top-middle of the Steam screen and select Inventory from the drop-down menu. You can also find a link in the right-hand menu of your profile page.
You can control who sees your items with Inventory privacy settings. The options are public, friends only, or private. You can adjust these settings through your Inventory or your general Profile settings.
Games received as an Extra Copy can be traded to other users. They can be used to trade for other Gifts, or for items in games supporting Steam Trading. Some older gift purchases on Steam can also be traded.
No. Only games that have granted as an extra copy, and thus have never been played, can be traded. Once a Steam Gift is opened and added to your game library, you won’t be able to trade it again.
Go to the game in your Steam Inventory and click “Unpack gift…” to add it to your library.
Please view the Revoked Gifts article for more information.
Steam Support will not return any items or gifts that you feel have been traded unfairly. There are no exceptions to this policy.
To ensure that a scammer is appropriately handled, and to prevent them from benefiting from this scam or others in the future, make sure that you report them through the Steam Community:
How to Report a Scammer, Hijacker or Phisher
Reporting a scammer through the Steam Community will always be better than submitting a Steam Support ticket containing your report. A community report includes the best information about the interaction between the accounts, and is quicker to review and act on.
To learn more about scams and trading, please see the Scam FAQ and the Recommended Trading Practices article.
A scam is when a user deceives another user into willingly (at the time) completing a trade, market transaction, or sending a gift. After the trade is completed, the person who was scammed either doesn’t receive what was promised, or the items involved are not what was agreed upon.
A hijacking is when an account or a computer is taken over by someone else without the account owner’s permission. This is often done with malware or a virus. In some cases the hijacker will convince a user to hand over their login information by providing a fake Steam or a third-party trading site. Hijackers most commonly steal accounts to gain items or games, and sometimes commit fraud. Hijackers often use stolen accounts to commit more hijackings. In these cases, we lock the account until the rightful owner contacts us about the hijacking.
For more information on hijacked accounts, please see the Reclaiming a Stolen Steam Account article and the Steam Item Restoration Policy.
For more information on scams, please read the Scam FAQ, Recommended Trading Practices article and the Steam Item Restoration Policy.
If evidence exists that the Steam user is a scammer, Steam Support will ban the account from using the Steam Community, including Trading and using the Steam Market. The length of the ban is dependent on the severity and quantity of the scams. In some cases, scammers will be banned permanently. If a scammer has multiple accounts, all of their accounts may be subject to the ban as well.
In some cases, scammers will hijack an account and use it to commit scams, fraud or more hijackings. In these cases, we lock the account until the rightful owner contacts us about the hijacking.
If you are scammed, please use the Report feature built into Steam:
Our community assigns an item a value that is at least partially determined by that item's scarcity. If more copies of the item are added to the economy through inventory rollbacks, the value of every other instance of that item would be reduced.
We sympathize with people who fall victim to scams, but we provide enough information on our website and within our trading system to help users make good trading decisions. All trade scams can be avoided.
A trade ban prevents a Steam account from using the Steam Community, including trading and using the Steam Market. A trade ban can only be applied by a Steam employee. Trade bans are mainly associated with accounts that commit scams.
Upon receiving a trade ban the offending account gets placed into probation as well. Probationary status allows other users to determine if a user has committed scams in the past so they can make better decisions about whether or not they want to trade with previous scammers. Probationary status does not prevent users from trading.
By limiting the provided data, Steam Support prevents malicious users from learning how to avoid getting caught in the future. Steam Support relies on several data points to arrive at a decision to ban or lock an account. Users intent on committing malicious activity, most often done to other users, are constantly trying to gain this data to use in future scams, fraud and hijackings.
There are different reasons why you may be unable to trade or use the Market. Please see the following Trading and Market Restrictions article for more information.
You can post feedback or suggestions in our Suggestions/Ideas forum as it is regularly read by our developers.