Steam Trade Holds Will Go Into Effect On December 9; New Feature To Stop Scammers!

The new Steam Trade Holds will go into effect on Dec. 9, according to PC Gamer.

Steam, the online store for PC games, has the trade section where players can personally trade with each other with trading cards and other items. There are in-game items that can be worth a lot of money due to The problem with this section is there are many scamming incidents happening and it has alarmed the Steam gaming community and Valve staff as well.

Steam Trade Holds feature will be appearing on Steam soon on Dec. 9 to help ward off scamming issues. The trades will be held for three days, which lets players investigate if their accounts have been compromised or not. If they find out there is something wrong, they can just cancel out their pending trades right away within the three-day waiting period, according to RockPaperShotgun.

A player can send items right away if both player and the other trader will have the Steam Mobile Authenticator which they have for at least a week. If both have confirmed in the app, they can trade right away. Otherwise, players are forced to use the Steam Trade Holds scheme. Players can remove the need for a trade hold with this method, according to Steam Support.

Game websites speculate that the Steam Mobile Authenticator can help Valve. If there are more players who use the Authenticator, then that means there will be less people who will get scammed. This will also mean there will be less players annoyed with the Steam Support and there will be less cases for them to handle. Valve is trying hard to make their customer support better. The Steam Trade Holds feature is just a secondary measure of those who do not have mobile phones and just use the internet for communication.

Valve is also offering 5-33 percent discounts on items in the Steam Community Market until Dec. 16 to celebrate those who are using the Mobile Authenticator.