-13 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Update to Our Content Policy
You know that linking these unknown Subs only makes them more popular, free exposure especially when you posted on this thread. You're unknowingly promoting it not fighting it.
Comment by Twilight_Sniper at 29/06/2020 at 22:28 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'm not worried about that. The subreddit in questions doesn't benefit from popularity at all, because it's not even a true community. The activity you see is fake. Posts either immediately go into moderation, or get removed (and posters banned) if they out the scam. There's just one guy, or sometimes a group (several of these exist), running a farm of stolen, purchased, or new Reddit accounts to make it look like an active, and therefore legit, community.
This kind of subreddit is used as bullet-proof, free, and anonymous hosting for cyber-criminals, and its only true members are the subreddit "moderators" running it. Steam got slightly better (not great, just better) at proactively removing and banning this garbage, so some affected scammers migrated here, and as long as Reddit admins continue dragging their feet with basic spam moderation like this, it will continue to be a viable place for scams, political manipulation, pump-and-dump cryptocurrency campaigns, and other clever spam campaigns. Admins here (pretend to) care about political spam, because they wound up in the news and scrutinized by some prosecutors over it, but that's just one of many flavors of the same thing - a symptom of poor moderation.
I linked someone else's Reddit post about how this particular scam works from r/Scams but to summarize, the scammer here uses the unlisted wiki page I linked for his "Steam admin license" to assert his authority and scare victims when extorting them. He doesn't even link it publicly, just privately in chat once he talks to the victim. He often targets people on legitimate trading subreddits like r/globaloffensivetrade and threatens them with VAC bans in Steam, Reddit shadowbans, or whatever else usually scares kids with expensive CS:GO skins who worry their luck may have run out.
I used to report phishing subreddits, and they took an average of about 3 weeks to get removed if reported correctly (reporting posts/comments with the report button only goes straight to the scammer's own mod queue, admins don't even look), but sometimes would take longer than a month, or get ignored completely. This one requires a little more than 5 seconds of reading to understand, so Reddit admins have decided to ignore me outright because it's not scrutinized as much as political spam, and therefore not a priority.