Valve has always been actively trying to curb scammers on the Steam Community Market, and it seems like the latest set of measures is also affecting legitimate users in the process.
As highlighted in a new post by Twitter user Gergely Szabo, who is a CS: GO trader and the founder of open source trader extension, Steam is now banning users for leaving comments related to trading on other players' profiles. It is added that the user had posted a comment on another user's profile asking them to fix their trade link and soon after that, they received a notice that their account has been banned for "posting or upvoting suspicious content on Steam." The user's inventory was worth a whopping $475k, so you can imagine the disappointment.
Notably, a number of users had replied to the original tweet reassuring the user that they are not the only one who has faced this problem, as it has reportedly been happening since last week.
However, the good news is that Steam support is actively responding to these false bans, and rectifying the errors as quickly as possible. Some users have reported that it took Steam support less than 24 hours to fix it, while others have specified much longer time frames.
Steam is known for banning users from posting URLs to shady websites, as it is one of the oldest tricks in the books for scammers. However, Valve has become much stricter with what comments count as spam, and has possibly extended it to anything related to buying.
Several users have received bans who have written comments related to "trade" or "buy", so users should be wary about these things before writing comments on other users' profiles.
CS: GO has been enjoying increased interest from the community lately, following the announcement of Counter-Strike 2. As a result, the community market has witnessed an unprecedented shift as well, with the value of several items rising significantly in the past few days. It seems like Valve is trying to employ more stringent policies to make the trading platform safer as well.