Forgive me if this doesn't belong here. But I felt that this is something rather important, and the entire trading community needs to know this.
Some of you may have noticed that there are a lot of Genuine Purity Fists floating about right now, and many of them are being sold for dirt cheap (1.00 ref seems to be the current standard at the moment).
Well, there's a reason for this. Turns out that a member of the website that claimed credit for hacking Steam's official forums somehow obtained several thousand redemption codes to get a free Genuine Purity Fist (these were given out during events like PAX and others). Whether or not these codes were stolen or simply cracked is irrelevant; they were obtained through illegal means.
This person then flooded the market with Genuine Purity Fists, and actually "hired" a bunch of people to help him distribute them (as well as other stolen items, such as Steam codes to activate other games).
Now, you may be wondering why it matters. Who cares if the GPF was stolen? I got it cheap, and it's a good item, so boo hoo to whoever it was stolen from.
Well, here's the thing. Valve can easily find every single stolen GPF and delete them from everybody's backpacks. They're already investigating the matter, and will probably be taking action. Which means that if you've bought a GPF in the past few days, then there's a good possibility that it will be removed from your backpack by Valve. And whatever you traded for it? You'll likely never get it back, either.
This is the short version. I'd suggest reading the longer version for more details about the incident.
In the meantime, I would strongly advise everybody to NOT buy any Genuine Purity Fists for a while, until this whole thing settles down, because there's a chance that you'll be finding an empty spot in your inventory where the GPF used to be, depending on how Valve handles this issue.
Some of you may have noticed that there are a lot of Genuine Purity Fists floating about right now, and many of them are being sold for dirt cheap (1.00 ref seems to be the current standard at the moment).
Well, there's a reason for this. Turns out that a member of the website that claimed credit for hacking Steam's official forums somehow obtained several thousand redemption codes to get a free Genuine Purity Fist (these were given out during events like PAX and others). Whether or not these codes were stolen or simply cracked is irrelevant; they were obtained through illegal means.
This person then flooded the market with Genuine Purity Fists, and actually "hired" a bunch of people to help him distribute them (as well as other stolen items, such as Steam codes to activate other games).
Now, you may be wondering why it matters. Who cares if the GPF was stolen? I got it cheap, and it's a good item, so boo hoo to whoever it was stolen from.
Well, here's the thing. Valve can easily find every single stolen GPF and delete them from everybody's backpacks. They're already investigating the matter, and will probably be taking action. Which means that if you've bought a GPF in the past few days, then there's a good possibility that it will be removed from your backpack by Valve. And whatever you traded for it? You'll likely never get it back, either.
This is the short version. I'd suggest reading the longer version for more details about the incident.
In the meantime, I would strongly advise everybody to NOT buy any Genuine Purity Fists for a while, until this whole thing settles down, because there's a chance that you'll be finding an empty spot in your inventory where the GPF used to be, depending on how Valve handles this issue.
