Valve has announced it has added a Captcha system to Steam’s trading process in a bid to curb unauthorized trades.
Announcing the change, Valve’s John Cook said “We’re updating trading to include a captcha as part of confirmation process. This is to prevent malware on users’ machines making trades on their behalf. We know it’s a bit of a hassle, and we don’t like making trading harder for users, but we do expect it to significantly help customers who are tricked into downloading and running malware from losing their items.”
Valve’s addition of Captcha to the confirmation process is aimed at protecting users from malware that takes over their account without their knowledge and empties out the inventory.
The CAPTCHA – Completely Automated Public Turing- test is used to help prove the user is a human being. Typically, a user is asked to input a series of characters based on an image in order to prove they are not a bot.
Cook said Valve has excluded some third-party trading services from its Captcha process, so not all users will notice a change.
“We’ve excluded a few of the existing third-party trading services from this requirement so they can continue to function. If you have any suggestions on the trading process please let us know. Thanks.”
Valve also recently updated its game trading policies where users are required to wait 30 days before using trade gifts.
