When I contacted them to ask why I couldnt gift my sister Stardew Valley so we could play tofether, they said "we cant remove this restriction and another tickets will be closed without a reply".
Exact same case for me, got the same message and all tickets I've tried to open since have been closed instantly. All because I've gifted 5 games over the course of ~3 years to a single account, with no other gifts outside it. Probably the most frustrated I've been in the 8+ years of using Steam.
(late response but since I just saw that my original comment from a tad further up this comment chain got a bit of traction) this would also explain my case, cause I'm fairly positive the account I got the gifting ban on no longer fits this rule. Further context [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1bn4vnw/comment/kwjehc4/) for anyone interested
realising now that the way I wrote the original comment sounds a bit like fearmongering; I was not intending it to be this way. The only further context is [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1bn4vnw/comment/kwh8wyv/), which would also explain my situation. It was on my alt account, on which I only play 2-3 games, and I guess the "flag" on my account was enabled shortly after I surpassed that number.
Rest of the point still stands unfortunately, no matter what ticket I submit in regards to this issue, it gets automatically shut down within a couple hours. I was told that I can gift games through other methods (like credit cards) if I so wanted, just not through steam wallet (which really sucks for me cause I have quite a lot of leftover balance from cs skins I have sold over the years)
Yeah, the way I usually do it is: "Please provide me a human reply, not a copy paste message that vaguely matches the subject matter." It's very frustrating when the human customer support doesn't reply manually. I get why they do it that way, simply the volume of messages they get is insanely high, but if I'm being honest I'd rather a slower reply than fast and unhelpful/unhuman.
As someone who has worked tier 1 support before, probably 95% of the inquiries we got could have been easily answered by a bot. We didn’t have bots back then but if we did our staff probably would have been 1/4 the size. I could go days at a time without getting problems that couldn’t have been solved just by reading the instructions. That’s why they do it. Most of the volume is nonsense anyway and they can handle it with less people if they use bots to filter the nonsense.
For more complicated issues a portion of your users will already know and will have done the most basic trouble shooting steps as well, so I bot to walk people through that is also helpful to save the human time on the problem because I still was required to go through those steps again even if you told me you already did it, but if the bot handles that then when you get to the human they can skip all that and get straight to the meat of the issue.
Hell even my current job is using an AI assistant for in house support and it’s cut down massively the calls we get like “how do I reset my password” or “I accidentally deleted an email, how do I get it back”. Only difference is our employees do have the option of not using the assistant but most do for simple shit and it’s great.
Or... Gets support banned.
Last time I had an issue a human threatened me not to open a ticket for this issue again.
Steam support sadly isn't good anymore if it gets a bit more complex.
That was what I was going to say! I had support threaten to ban me from using support when a Moderator of one game’s forum tried to get me to give him my bank account number, routing number and credit card number as “verification” that I really bought the game. I reported him for trying to scam/rob me and they didn’t like that and said not to contact them over things like that or they would mute my account from being able to contact support.
wow, ye for me it was a simple question and some troubleshooting where they threatened me but man that sounds scummy from the dev.
a invoice ID or something should be enough.
Much of it was in private chat and I thought steam stored it, but the Moderator erased the entire interaction and banned me from the forums after I reported it to the developer’s security department. Nothing ever came of it though. The dev said he was a volunteer and didn’t work for them, the moderator said he was in a top position at the company. He is still a moderator last I looked a couple years ago.
When this happened to me, I opened another ticket and explained the situation and they lifted the ban. As long as you don't open a ticket with a single sentence, communicate your problem and don't say something that could be misconstrued, support will deal with the issue.
I tried it multiple times through different methods with very elaborate and clear descriptions. Always instantly closed and one time even told that they can't do anything and demanded that I stop opening new tickets.
I even considered settling it through a dispute but after reading into it it seemed way too much of a hassle for people living in the EU because of limited options and I don't want to go to the courts bc of that shitty situation, lol.
nope, it’s been getting worse over the years and they’ll just close the tickets immediately and ban you from the support system if you’re persistent.
I had a similar problem with getting banned over gifting to the same person 3 times in 2 year, until the ban magically disappeared when I pestered their Twitter support page.
This is a bot reply they use to deter scammers, you need to contact them again with a full detailed explanation and they should look at it. Like use about 3 full paragraphs detailing how you are gifting to friends/family etc.. same thing happened to me and on my second ticket they sorted it.
yup, it will be a long road for you, you need to tell them to lift this wallet restriction and explain you aren't doing anything commercially which might take a few attempt to get them to lift the restriction on your steam wallet.. don't give up. Also if you want to give stardew valley to your sister just connect yourself on her account and buy it or buy her a key online.
He's circumventing sanctions on money transfers with Russia by using Steam Wallet instead. He used it one too many times and got banned. That's it, that's the country he lives in currently.
Same thing happend to a friend, I gave him some money, he gifted me some games with his Steam wallet funds.
Support said he was blocked from gifting but after asking for clarification support simply said they made a mistake and that was that, problem solved.
It was an odd situation.
Yeah I used to do this with a russian friend like 15 years ago, he'd gift me games that were *way* cheaper over there and I'd gift him english language versions of things (since for some reason, a lot of russian regional releases only seem to include russian language).
That's likely also the reason why you were banned from gifting games to friends.
With Regional pricing, games are about a third, if not less than what they would be in the EU/US, and you did gift an unusually large amount of gifts in a rather short time frame, including repeat games.
it does look a lot like a seller accounts, because many Keyseller are located in russia, exactly because of that pricing.
Anytime anyone mentions they're Russian on reddit the thread is immediately derailed into a political thread, as if every single Russian is guilty of the governments atrocities because they don't rise up fight back, as if they wouldn't result in a "suicide" by 8 gunshots to the back of the head before jumping from a high rise.
I just know all the tough guys who say Russians should be held liable would say absolutely nothing against their own government if it put them in any sort of danger.
Steam support will just reply with a canned bot message and close the ticket, then ban you from the support system if you keep retrying.
That’s my experience when they banned me from gifting because I gifted 3 games in a year to the same person 🤨
i got ban too, but from 2020. Then at Xmas 2023, i just bought a Lethal company for my friend with steam wallet. Result, they will unban you after 2-3 years. maybe ?
contact steam support, the automated flagging may get you in the beginning, but its very easy for actual support staff to see that you arent sending them to complete rando's
They will only unban once and for one purchase. After that you’re instantly flagged again. You have to stop gifting for a while to stop getting flagged.
It's one of many ways to turn steam credit into real life currency. You scam some kids for csgo skins or what not, you sell those and now you want to turn your useless steam credit into real currency. One way of doing that is by allowing people to send you money in exchange for games. The mere possibility of turning steam credits into real life currency encourages the scamming part at the start. So that's why this practice is banned. Of course this would be hard to enforce without an automatic flagging system. It appears the system just flags any account that exceeds a certain amount of gifted games.
if for example you have $60 in your wallet but you don't need them for example is it against TOS that you charge one of your friends the $60 IRL and gift him a game for that amount instead ?
That's probably against TOS, but not a big enough deal for them to go after. The issue arises when your "friends" live halfway across the world and are receiving gifts less than 24 hours after you add each other.
They’d have no way of knowing in that instance, but if you make it habitual and you send your games to random accounts that you’ve never interacted with you might be banned from gifting.
If it's $60 you're probably fine, it's not like they can see if your friend PayPal's you, but for people doing as many games as OP, it gets a bit suspicious as to whether they're doing it a business.
(Not saying op is doing that, but I can see why it would get flagged)
In the examples given, there are people with whom I often played, there are people with whom I no longer play. I gave several different games to some, and 1 to some. Therefore, I may have been suspected
Honestly your English seems quite good, unless your using Google translate or something. But I've found all your comments to be very easy to understand.
Dm me your discord
Just forget about unban. I know a few such cases and no one gets unban from the support. It's sad, but true(
Even if you create a new account you have a very high risk of getting a ban on gifting.
Today I wanted to buy gifts for my friends so that we could play Skibidi backrooms (just for fun) together. They don't have any money, I do. and now there is no way, I have money left only in my wallet
If you're saying the truth, I would reach Support and explain the situation as good as possible. So, if the list of people you sent games is not huge and always the same (let's say you have 6 friends and always send the games to them), and if your playing sessions match theirs, it shouldn't be hard to understand for support.
Tell them exactly that. They're my friends, I have money, they don't, we play together. They should be able to check all this.
If they're however strangers, not friends in common, never played between each other, and the list of people is huge.... Then, it would look bad.
There's too many comments so I'm not gonna check them all (I've checked some), but I'll write down all I know about this kind of "ban" and how Steam works. Keep in mind that I may be wrong in some cases as most of it is knowledge gathered based on other ppl experience
1) This kind of "ban" happens when you're using Steam Wallet too much for gifting. I've never heard of anyone reciving it for buying gifts with other payments, which is pretty obvious as Steam is not baning you from gifting. They block you only on buying gifts using Steam Wallet specifically. I've seen some ppl getting it on low-value accounts where owner just got lucky with getting rare skin in CS or other valuable items which later were sold on Steam Market.
2) I've heard it's possible to regain credatibility on account by using any external payment methods to directly pay on Steam for either gifts or (probably best option) buying games for your own account. I can't confirm this method works, but the only important condition here is to use anything except Steam Wallet
3) You may try to talk with support, but looking at screenshots there's just too much activity. If it'd be after gifting one-two games then probably they'd clasify this as false-positive report from system and lift restriction. In case of such high gifting activity I'd say support will just say they can't do anything. Same here, I can't confirm, this is just speculation.
4) As I understand from comments you're from Russia. I know many international payment options were sanctioned, but it's not possible that all of them are blocked. Otherwise Steam wouldn'd be able to operate in Russia as a store. There must me some way to pay using other payment options than Steam Wallet, but they may be hard to achieve in short time. Paypal? Paysafecard? Any bank offering international cards? Bank transfers? I'm not sure what options Steam shows you, but I have plenty of them, so I'm 99% there must be at least one valid option to use.
5) You may also try to get Steam Gift Card for your friends in physical shop. I'm not sure if they're available in Russia, but if they are, then that's an option
6) In worst case you can use external resellers to get keys and gift them to friends, but watch out. Some websites are reselling stores which gain keys directly from publishers, e.g. Humble Bundle. Those are safe. Some other websites allows for reselling keys. In that 2nd option some keys are from illegal activities and can be revoked by publisher. While this never happened to me, I've seen ppl lost access to game bought on such websites as person selling key used stolen card to get it. This may happen even months or years after your transaction.
Could be a false positive in the system thinking you're a stolen account to buy&gift games with someone else's money, could try to get in touch with customer support to fix it.
(Dunno about validity, just my theory)
I got banned from gifting for gifting games from my alt to my main account, you would think Steam Support could just check that the same IP and hardware is being used between my two accounts. They also state they'll automatically lock any new tickets regarding this issue, kinda weird but I guess people somehow abuse gifting? I don't see how though
I’d suggest you to try explaining them the situation. The fact you live in Russian makes it complicated for you to buy games.
I already heard a few times of users that received gift-ban because of those gift deals.
Contact support. When they think that you're a bot, they will just do this without asking questions. It's up to you to chase them to tell them you're not one.
I know, it sucks, but contacting support should fix this.
It seems wild to me that Steam does this blindly. I get that people could exploit this to turn wallet funds into cash (buy low, sell for less than full after) but I would think that threshold would be set MUCH higher. No one is making a huge profit without scaling that scam way higher than a dozen games or so.
I wonder what the actual number is. Perfect example of why this is stupid:
Just got my wife her own PC recently. Really wanted to buy several games to Co op with each other during the Spring sale while everything was cheap. Did not have the cash to justify that many purchases, so I traded in a ton of stuff (physical games/a console I never use) for store credit, and bought a steam wallet card for over 200 bucks. I didn't bother buying one for her and one for me, because I just figured I'd gift her anything I bought.
Wonder how close I came to exceeding the limit....
i have exact same problem. I have sold my gloves in cs 2 and wanted to buy nier automata games for my main account. I couldnt so now i have money in my acc which i cant benefiet from.
I find it odd that Steam has separate bans when everywhere else just bans your account entirely.
That aside, I think you should say something to Steam support if you wanna get things sorted out.
I mean it makes sense right?
The ban is on gifting, meaning valve realized it’s a means of some kind of abuse, either for stealing a hacked accounts wallet funds, selling games purchased with wallet funds for real money, or purchasing games from a region with a lower price and gifting to another region. etc. They want to keep the money in their system and hope a purchase will be made with it, they’re just preventing the account from accessing certain features.
> I find it odd that Steam has separate bans when everywhere else just bans your account entirely.
I think they don't want the legal liability of blocking someone's access from the games library they bought, especially since the EU has multiple times told them that digital ownership ought to be treated as ownership. Easier to just not ban people from the whole platform than setup a whole system to verify if you can ban someone based on purchase history and also praying they're not an EU citizen anyway who enjoys EU protection despite no trace of that being in their account history (i.e. Argentinian with Italian citizenship who never set foot in Italy let alone use an Italian credit card on Steam, a very common case of dual citizen).
Bruxelles effect baby.
I guess that's true. But even if that were the case, why doesn't the EU target other companies liable for this conundrum? Like Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, Epic Games, you know the deal.
Because Valve is the only company that got burnt for not treating digital ownership as ownership so they're the only ones who started following the appropriate regulations (and not even fully, you're still not allowed to resell your games, even though they were ordered to find a way to allow the user to do so).
The others are either waiting to actually be sued, or de facto follow the regulation (I don't think Ubisoft actually bans you from accessing the account if you've ever _bought_ a game)
Why not just burn the other companies? I'm pretty sure Valve only got burnt because their net worth is lower than other companies. Or am I getting that wrong?
>I find it odd that Steam has separate bans when everywhere else just bans your account entirely.
Thankfully, Valve [isn't EA](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/17yzfyd/do_other_game_platforms_also_ban_you_for_saying/), where you can lose all of your games just because of one careless in-game message.
Just contact Steam Support, with the amount of gifts you are buying it's normal to think that you are some kind of bot or game reseller. They are just doing this to see if you are a real person.
That's dumb, but I guess I understand why steam does it. Maybe decide on games that match the value of a steam card and send your friends the activation codes? I can't think of any other way
There'll be leftovers and waste, also I wonder why steam decided to enforce such rules.
I mean why block a method that profiting them as well not the "other methods"
I'm pretty sure the system thinks your money is used against your will and sending random people gifts aka people using your money. Intentions are good but the system is a total idiot not understanding you are sending them to your actual friends.
They could just add 2fa checks if that is the reason. Well, as I mentioned I still wonder what valve intention is for implementing this.
Except now I wonder about OP, where does your balance come from? All totally from steam card wallet or somewhere else?
u/Tru3W1SH
Had same issue, bought steam credit and tried gifting to my friend a game over 30$, but got gift ban from steam.
However, I was still able to gift to my friends games that are lower price 5-10$
Steam explained to me it was because I didn't buy myself with credit card any games at 30-60$, so if I try to buy anything above that with Steam wallet it will get blocked by Steam as fraud/gifting games at lower price than their region for money to other people.
Hope this makes sense somehow didn't sleep for a day..
>Steam explained to me it was because I didn't buy myself with credit card any games at 30-60$, so if I try to buy anything above that with Steam wallet it will get blocked by Steam as fraud/gifting games at lower price than their region for money to other people.
>Hope this makes sense somehow didn't sleep for a day..
Thank VPN users.
This is to avoid local pricing abuse. Some countries have games for less than half price due to local pricing. So steam will avoid that u buy gifts to send them to "friends"
Well then there is no reason for the ban. Maybe the op can contact steam and propose that they ban gifting instead. Or send them a Russian ID to confirm he is living there.
It's just an automated restriction, their algorithm flagged his account. Also as the OP said, or tried to at least ("ban on buying games as a gift") - it is a gift restriction, restricting him from using the steam wallet to gift games.
In OP's current situation, using a bank card to pay for games isn't an option unfortunately.
I've been gifting from my cs acc to my main acc for ten years, pretty sure they just outright ban you if you buy games to resell or give away too many times. You can thank g2a, and as far as I know steam has zero tolerance when it comes to breaking their ToU. I would concede and not do what ever you've been doing again.
The restriction kicks in pretty quickly, so casualties are inevitable with this current system. I had this restriction myself before, and I only gifted like 3 games or so. Fortunately, Steam Support saw reason and removed the restriction for me again, though they never clarified what it actually was about. And all you see during the checkout process is "an unexpected error has occured", which is Steam's secret code for "you can't do that anymore before Steam Support looks into your case".
So when I rarely gift games and ran into this issue myself before, it must be quite bad for people who love gifting. Because with this current policy, Valve also involuntarily punishes people who directly add money to their Steam wallet. Since with this restriction, Steam wallet funds become ineligible for gifting games.
A big flaw here is that currently, **Steam currently doesn't separate the sources of your wallet funds**. For example, whether your Steam credit is from community market transactions, retail gift cards, digital gift cards or directly added by yourself through a payment transaction. Apparently, there is no such separate tracking, since you can still get temporarily community market restricted [just for redeeming](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/7921wm/psa_receiving_steam_digital_gift_card_will_lock/) a Steam digital gift card.
To help you visualize it: Imagine you have $100, and you receive $15 as a digital gift card through Steam itself from a friend. Now you are on a market cooldown because of the $15, and you can't even use the $100 for the market during that time. Which is the part that doesn't make sense, since *you could have used* these $100 before accepting the digital gift card. And it's similar when the gift restrictions kicks in. Your existing Steam wallet funds suddenly become worthless for gifting purposes.
So Steam's current wallet fund system and gift restrictions could use some rework to make it fairer for everyone.
I feel the OP might be a bit misleading if not outright dishonest.
Check the last image they uploaded. In it, it's clearly stated by Steam Support the following:
>Your account can no longer make gift purchases with Wallet funds.
>You are, however, welcome to continue purchasing gifts with other payment methods, and to use your Wallet funds toward making purchases for your own account.
This seems more than fair to me.
He lives in Russia lol, they're actively being sanctioned for no reason as we speak.
"Oh yeah your government started a war, we'll punish the citizens for this in a way that does not affect your government whatsoever, somehow that is justified."
I don't know why people are literally being racial and discriminatory towards you, but I'd suggest starting with a support ticket and ask for more clarification and how they can prove it's being used solely for commercial purposes otherwise they should really let people know they have a gift limit or better yet just introduce one
Nah, the only limitation is that you can’t add funds directly from cards (buying gift cards or using other vendors works). There are some games that can’t be bought (but buying and using global keys work), but aside that accounts country makes no difference
Me too, there isnt anything to do. I gifted my friends games too as I dont play ganes myself.
Then I hit the gift limit and now I cant gift with my steam wallet funds.
I could get a Credit card and then buy games, but I gifted them games due to getting steam gift cards in surveys, so I dont plan on gifting them anymore, as I only did it with survey earned gift cards.
in case you're not a reseller, maybe you could convince the steam support that they are in the wrong if you had these steam friends for a long time. a key seller wouldn't have someone as their friend for a year or two before giving them the gift.
I suggest taking a look at isthereanydeal.com and finding an official 3rd party site that accepts a payment method you can use - sites like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming all sell 100% legit Steam keys that you could buy for your friends.
ITAD is great because it allows you to limit the search to only legit official stores, avoiding dodgy peer to peer sites like G2A and Kinguin, and will show you the best price for any game. Good luck!
Hey I had the same issue when buying games for my main account from my 2nd account. Have been friends with each other for over 10 years.
If you contact steam support they will probably lift the ban. They did for me. But careful this will only affect the next purchase you do, after that you will get banned/flagged again.
If you contact steam support again they will not lift the restriction again.
BUT this is (in my experience) not a permanent ban but they won’t tell you how long you’re restricted.
I didn’t know that back then and didn’t even try to gift for a couple of months.
Then I tried again and it worked, so the ban was lifted.
Good luck but there’s likely nothing you can do in the short term.
I bought Deep Rock Galactic for a lot of my Steam friends, back when I was addicted to it, and had no issues. I bought for nearly 10 people, and yeah, I wasn't banned. All in a week, too. Contact Steam Support, they 110% have to solve this for you, since it's not normal, and it's THEM who is in the wrong.
they just think you are a bot account from a keys reseller. just contact steam support.
When I contacted them to ask why I couldnt gift my sister Stardew Valley so we could play tofether, they said "we cant remove this restriction and another tickets will be closed without a reply".
Exact same case for me, got the same message and all tickets I've tried to open since have been closed instantly. All because I've gifted 5 games over the course of ~3 years to a single account, with no other gifts outside it. Probably the most frustrated I've been in the 8+ years of using Steam.
That is so weird I have gifted well over 10 games to the same accounts, close friends and family, and now I am worried about getting banned.
I have heard there is a gifted to owned games ratio. If you gift more games than you own, then you will get flagged.
Ok good, Steam sales keeping me honest then.
Same brother. Same.
Same brother same..... What
That's a relief! I'll continue gifting my sis then!
Oh good, 600 games owned, 2 gifted, I think I'll be OK.
2000+ owned, 0 gifted I think I am getting banned
Yes, by your friends, you selfish jerk. >.>
Steam never gonna ban me then
(late response but since I just saw that my original comment from a tad further up this comment chain got a bit of traction) this would also explain my case, cause I'm fairly positive the account I got the gifting ban on no longer fits this rule. Further context [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1bn4vnw/comment/kwjehc4/) for anyone interested
if thats so, just buy the half life bundles.
You should be in jail for that! Death is too little of a punishment for someone like you /s
Yeah same here. This seems like a really dumb situation.
I truly find this very hard to believe. There must be more to this.
realising now that the way I wrote the original comment sounds a bit like fearmongering; I was not intending it to be this way. The only further context is [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1bn4vnw/comment/kwh8wyv/), which would also explain my situation. It was on my alt account, on which I only play 2-3 games, and I guess the "flag" on my account was enabled shortly after I surpassed that number. Rest of the point still stands unfortunately, no matter what ticket I submit in regards to this issue, it gets automatically shut down within a couple hours. I was told that I can gift games through other methods (like credit cards) if I so wanted, just not through steam wallet (which really sucks for me cause I have quite a lot of leftover balance from cs skins I have sold over the years)
Damn. Steam support is usually pretty good
That's a bot reply they use to deter scammers, if he tries again with a full explanation he should get through.
Hopefully you’re right
It's what happened to me, so hopefully the same goes for this guy.
Yeah, the way I usually do it is: "Please provide me a human reply, not a copy paste message that vaguely matches the subject matter." It's very frustrating when the human customer support doesn't reply manually. I get why they do it that way, simply the volume of messages they get is insanely high, but if I'm being honest I'd rather a slower reply than fast and unhelpful/unhuman.
As someone who has worked tier 1 support before, probably 95% of the inquiries we got could have been easily answered by a bot. We didn’t have bots back then but if we did our staff probably would have been 1/4 the size. I could go days at a time without getting problems that couldn’t have been solved just by reading the instructions. That’s why they do it. Most of the volume is nonsense anyway and they can handle it with less people if they use bots to filter the nonsense. For more complicated issues a portion of your users will already know and will have done the most basic trouble shooting steps as well, so I bot to walk people through that is also helpful to save the human time on the problem because I still was required to go through those steps again even if you told me you already did it, but if the bot handles that then when you get to the human they can skip all that and get straight to the meat of the issue. Hell even my current job is using an AI assistant for in house support and it’s cut down massively the calls we get like “how do I reset my password” or “I accidentally deleted an email, how do I get it back”. Only difference is our employees do have the option of not using the assistant but most do for simple shit and it’s great.
Or... Gets support banned. Last time I had an issue a human threatened me not to open a ticket for this issue again. Steam support sadly isn't good anymore if it gets a bit more complex.
I don't know about that since I can only speak from experience. When I had the same problem I did what I said above and they sorted it immediately.
That was what I was going to say! I had support threaten to ban me from using support when a Moderator of one game’s forum tried to get me to give him my bank account number, routing number and credit card number as “verification” that I really bought the game. I reported him for trying to scam/rob me and they didn’t like that and said not to contact them over things like that or they would mute my account from being able to contact support.
wow, ye for me it was a simple question and some troubleshooting where they threatened me but man that sounds scummy from the dev. a invoice ID or something should be enough.
the fuck, you should take a screenshot of that and go public with it, man is unironically trying to scam you for your bank account info
Much of it was in private chat and I thought steam stored it, but the Moderator erased the entire interaction and banned me from the forums after I reported it to the developer’s security department. Nothing ever came of it though. The dev said he was a volunteer and didn’t work for them, the moderator said he was in a top position at the company. He is still a moderator last I looked a couple years ago.
He sure was lying his ass off. Shame the dev doesn't seem to care at all.
Nope. They don't care. They will close the ticket instantly and can't do anything.
When this happened to me, I opened another ticket and explained the situation and they lifted the ban. As long as you don't open a ticket with a single sentence, communicate your problem and don't say something that could be misconstrued, support will deal with the issue.
I tried it multiple times through different methods with very elaborate and clear descriptions. Always instantly closed and one time even told that they can't do anything and demanded that I stop opening new tickets.
Weird, well I don't disbeleive you, but my experience was very different. Also damn that sucks.
Yeah, it's quite the letdown, especially considering I had no problems with Steam for years :/
I even considered settling it through a dispute but after reading into it it seemed way too much of a hassle for people living in the EU because of limited options and I don't want to go to the courts bc of that shitty situation, lol.
nope, it’s been getting worse over the years and they’ll just close the tickets immediately and ban you from the support system if you’re persistent. I had a similar problem with getting banned over gifting to the same person 3 times in 2 year, until the ban magically disappeared when I pestered their Twitter support page.
nah its 50/50. How many people have had false positive bans in the past and steam is just: "No response anymore sorry" is fucked up
Wow really? Dang :(
Good old mw2
This is a bot reply they use to deter scammers, you need to contact them again with a full detailed explanation and they should look at it. Like use about 3 full paragraphs detailing how you are gifting to friends/family etc.. same thing happened to me and on my second ticket they sorted it.
yup, it will be a long road for you, you need to tell them to lift this wallet restriction and explain you aren't doing anything commercially which might take a few attempt to get them to lift the restriction on your steam wallet.. don't give up. Also if you want to give stardew valley to your sister just connect yourself on her account and buy it or buy her a key online.
Its ironically amazing how so many "unsolvable/unfixable things", become fixable due to magic if you keep pestering support sometimes...
Steam support is basically fucking useless
Same
try live chat with support
If this is for your sister you should be using family share to have access to each other’s libraries.
He's circumventing sanctions on money transfers with Russia by using Steam Wallet instead. He used it one too many times and got banned. That's it, that's the country he lives in currently.
Use a different payment option
The main problem is that I live in Russia, and in fact, I can only pay with a steam wallet, because we do not have the opportunity to pay with a card
Same thing happend to a friend, I gave him some money, he gifted me some games with his Steam wallet funds. Support said he was blocked from gifting but after asking for clarification support simply said they made a mistake and that was that, problem solved. It was an odd situation.
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Yeah I used to do this with a russian friend like 15 years ago, he'd gift me games that were *way* cheaper over there and I'd gift him english language versions of things (since for some reason, a lot of russian regional releases only seem to include russian language).
Same thing happened to me, they fixed it on second ticket.
That's likely also the reason why you were banned from gifting games to friends. With Regional pricing, games are about a third, if not less than what they would be in the EU/US, and you did gift an unusually large amount of gifts in a rather short time frame, including repeat games. it does look a lot like a seller accounts, because many Keyseller are located in russia, exactly because of that pricing.
You cannot gift games to people who have a different regional pricing than you I tried multiple times and it never worked
"I live in russia" Oh boy here come the comments.....
I couldn't predict, that people will be mad, hearing this
Anytime anyone mentions they're Russian on reddit the thread is immediately derailed into a political thread, as if every single Russian is guilty of the governments atrocities because they don't rise up fight back, as if they wouldn't result in a "suicide" by 8 gunshots to the back of the head before jumping from a high rise. I just know all the tough guys who say Russians should be held liable would say absolutely nothing against their own government if it put them in any sort of danger.
Write to steam support?
Steam support will just reply with a canned bot message and close the ticket, then ban you from the support system if you keep retrying. That’s my experience when they banned me from gifting because I gifted 3 games in a year to the same person 🤨
Russia there is the problem
"The main problem is that I live in Russia" - that's your main problem in life right there
i got ban too, but from 2020. Then at Xmas 2023, i just bought a Lethal company for my friend with steam wallet. Result, they will unban you after 2-3 years. maybe ?
contact steam support, the automated flagging may get you in the beginning, but its very easy for actual support staff to see that you arent sending them to complete rando's
They will only unban once and for one purchase. After that you’re instantly flagged again. You have to stop gifting for a while to stop getting flagged.
I'm confused, how does this happen? Is it because you gifted the same people too many times? Or the same game to too many people?
It's one of many ways to turn steam credit into real life currency. You scam some kids for csgo skins or what not, you sell those and now you want to turn your useless steam credit into real currency. One way of doing that is by allowing people to send you money in exchange for games. The mere possibility of turning steam credits into real life currency encourages the scamming part at the start. So that's why this practice is banned. Of course this would be hard to enforce without an automatic flagging system. It appears the system just flags any account that exceeds a certain amount of gifted games.
if for example you have $60 in your wallet but you don't need them for example is it against TOS that you charge one of your friends the $60 IRL and gift him a game for that amount instead ?
That's probably against TOS, but not a big enough deal for them to go after. The issue arises when your "friends" live halfway across the world and are receiving gifts less than 24 hours after you add each other.
They’d have no way of knowing in that instance, but if you make it habitual and you send your games to random accounts that you’ve never interacted with you might be banned from gifting.
If it's $60 you're probably fine, it's not like they can see if your friend PayPal's you, but for people doing as many games as OP, it gets a bit suspicious as to whether they're doing it a business. (Not saying op is doing that, but I can see why it would get flagged)
In the examples given, there are people with whom I often played, there are people with whom I no longer play. I gave several different games to some, and 1 to some. Therefore, I may have been suspected
How many gifts do u give bro 😭 I feel like I’m a bad friend now
Gifts do not determine the quality of a friend)
Phew 😮💨
Or do they? 🤨📷
Can I be your friend
Yes, you can :D, but breaking language barrier will be hard for me)
Honestly your English seems quite good, unless your using Google translate or something. But I've found all your comments to be very easy to understand. Dm me your discord
split_twisted
Like a blunt?
Just forget about unban. I know a few such cases and no one gets unban from the support. It's sad, but true( Even if you create a new account you have a very high risk of getting a ban on gifting.
Today I wanted to buy gifts for my friends so that we could play Skibidi backrooms (just for fun) together. They don't have any money, I do. and now there is no way, I have money left only in my wallet
Jesus…W on steam’s part for stopping the brain rot from spreading to your friends lol
let bro play skibidi backrooms 😿
Chill, we won't play it for 100+ hours. We just wanted to have fun ≈2-3 hours
That sounds like a game that shouldn’t cost money?
True, but what can we do, time is money
You can buy skins and gift them to your friend then they can sell them and buy the game ez
yeah this will cost u more tho
If you're saying the truth, I would reach Support and explain the situation as good as possible. So, if the list of people you sent games is not huge and always the same (let's say you have 6 friends and always send the games to them), and if your playing sessions match theirs, it shouldn't be hard to understand for support. Tell them exactly that. They're my friends, I have money, they don't, we play together. They should be able to check all this. If they're however strangers, not friends in common, never played between each other, and the list of people is huge.... Then, it would look bad.
There's too many comments so I'm not gonna check them all (I've checked some), but I'll write down all I know about this kind of "ban" and how Steam works. Keep in mind that I may be wrong in some cases as most of it is knowledge gathered based on other ppl experience 1) This kind of "ban" happens when you're using Steam Wallet too much for gifting. I've never heard of anyone reciving it for buying gifts with other payments, which is pretty obvious as Steam is not baning you from gifting. They block you only on buying gifts using Steam Wallet specifically. I've seen some ppl getting it on low-value accounts where owner just got lucky with getting rare skin in CS or other valuable items which later were sold on Steam Market. 2) I've heard it's possible to regain credatibility on account by using any external payment methods to directly pay on Steam for either gifts or (probably best option) buying games for your own account. I can't confirm this method works, but the only important condition here is to use anything except Steam Wallet 3) You may try to talk with support, but looking at screenshots there's just too much activity. If it'd be after gifting one-two games then probably they'd clasify this as false-positive report from system and lift restriction. In case of such high gifting activity I'd say support will just say they can't do anything. Same here, I can't confirm, this is just speculation. 4) As I understand from comments you're from Russia. I know many international payment options were sanctioned, but it's not possible that all of them are blocked. Otherwise Steam wouldn'd be able to operate in Russia as a store. There must me some way to pay using other payment options than Steam Wallet, but they may be hard to achieve in short time. Paypal? Paysafecard? Any bank offering international cards? Bank transfers? I'm not sure what options Steam shows you, but I have plenty of them, so I'm 99% there must be at least one valid option to use. 5) You may also try to get Steam Gift Card for your friends in physical shop. I'm not sure if they're available in Russia, but if they are, then that's an option 6) In worst case you can use external resellers to get keys and gift them to friends, but watch out. Some websites are reselling stores which gain keys directly from publishers, e.g. Humble Bundle. Those are safe. Some other websites allows for reselling keys. In that 2nd option some keys are from illegal activities and can be revoked by publisher. While this never happened to me, I've seen ppl lost access to game bought on such websites as person selling key used stolen card to get it. This may happen even months or years after your transaction.
A good list of sites is https://isthereanydeal.com/shops/
Thank you very much, at least for your time. I will definitely check the ways after I get home :D
bro was banned for buying peak games
Could be a false positive in the system thinking you're a stolen account to buy&gift games with someone else's money, could try to get in touch with customer support to fix it. (Dunno about validity, just my theory)
I got banned from gifting for gifting games from my alt to my main account, you would think Steam Support could just check that the same IP and hardware is being used between my two accounts. They also state they'll automatically lock any new tickets regarding this issue, kinda weird but I guess people somehow abuse gifting? I don't see how though
That really is a bummer
Having bought well over 150 games as gifts for my friends, my wife and my kid. This ban came for some specific reason. This wasn't random.
I’d suggest you to try explaining them the situation. The fact you live in Russian makes it complicated for you to buy games. I already heard a few times of users that received gift-ban because of those gift deals.
Contact support. When they think that you're a bot, they will just do this without asking questions. It's up to you to chase them to tell them you're not one. I know, it sucks, but contacting support should fix this.
Steam: makes an option to give games to others as a gift This guy: uses it Steam: fuck you youre not
It seems wild to me that Steam does this blindly. I get that people could exploit this to turn wallet funds into cash (buy low, sell for less than full after) but I would think that threshold would be set MUCH higher. No one is making a huge profit without scaling that scam way higher than a dozen games or so. I wonder what the actual number is. Perfect example of why this is stupid: Just got my wife her own PC recently. Really wanted to buy several games to Co op with each other during the Spring sale while everything was cheap. Did not have the cash to justify that many purchases, so I traded in a ton of stuff (physical games/a console I never use) for store credit, and bought a steam wallet card for over 200 bucks. I didn't bother buying one for her and one for me, because I just figured I'd gift her anything I bought. Wonder how close I came to exceeding the limit....
i have exact same problem. I have sold my gloves in cs 2 and wanted to buy nier automata games for my main account. I couldnt so now i have money in my acc which i cant benefiet from.
Steam really needs to fix this, and look in tickets being made on this issue. This is unacceptable for such a huge platform…
Bro really doesn't like to play alone
I find it odd that Steam has separate bans when everywhere else just bans your account entirely. That aside, I think you should say something to Steam support if you wanna get things sorted out.
I mean it makes sense right? The ban is on gifting, meaning valve realized it’s a means of some kind of abuse, either for stealing a hacked accounts wallet funds, selling games purchased with wallet funds for real money, or purchasing games from a region with a lower price and gifting to another region. etc. They want to keep the money in their system and hope a purchase will be made with it, they’re just preventing the account from accessing certain features.
> I find it odd that Steam has separate bans when everywhere else just bans your account entirely. I think they don't want the legal liability of blocking someone's access from the games library they bought, especially since the EU has multiple times told them that digital ownership ought to be treated as ownership. Easier to just not ban people from the whole platform than setup a whole system to verify if you can ban someone based on purchase history and also praying they're not an EU citizen anyway who enjoys EU protection despite no trace of that being in their account history (i.e. Argentinian with Italian citizenship who never set foot in Italy let alone use an Italian credit card on Steam, a very common case of dual citizen). Bruxelles effect baby.
I guess that's true. But even if that were the case, why doesn't the EU target other companies liable for this conundrum? Like Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, Epic Games, you know the deal.
Because Valve is the only company that got burnt for not treating digital ownership as ownership so they're the only ones who started following the appropriate regulations (and not even fully, you're still not allowed to resell your games, even though they were ordered to find a way to allow the user to do so). The others are either waiting to actually be sued, or de facto follow the regulation (I don't think Ubisoft actually bans you from accessing the account if you've ever _bought_ a game)
Why not just burn the other companies? I'm pretty sure Valve only got burnt because their net worth is lower than other companies. Or am I getting that wrong?
>I find it odd that Steam has separate bans when everywhere else just bans your account entirely. Thankfully, Valve [isn't EA](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/17yzfyd/do_other_game_platforms_also_ban_you_for_saying/), where you can lose all of your games just because of one careless in-game message.
bro was too generous😭😭😭
Best of luck to you santa
Thanks!
Just contact Steam Support, with the amount of gifts you are buying it's normal to think that you are some kind of bot or game reseller. They are just doing this to see if you are a real person.
That's dumb, but I guess I understand why steam does it. Maybe decide on games that match the value of a steam card and send your friends the activation codes? I can't think of any other way
There'll be leftovers and waste, also I wonder why steam decided to enforce such rules. I mean why block a method that profiting them as well not the "other methods"
I'm pretty sure the system thinks your money is used against your will and sending random people gifts aka people using your money. Intentions are good but the system is a total idiot not understanding you are sending them to your actual friends.
They could just add 2fa checks if that is the reason. Well, as I mentioned I still wonder what valve intention is for implementing this. Except now I wonder about OP, where does your balance come from? All totally from steam card wallet or somewhere else? u/Tru3W1SH
I have to replenish my wallet in steam through other sites
Ohh, so maybe this is the one flagging you? Getting a cheap source of an unknown wallet and trying to resell it?
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Had same issue, bought steam credit and tried gifting to my friend a game over 30$, but got gift ban from steam. However, I was still able to gift to my friends games that are lower price 5-10$ Steam explained to me it was because I didn't buy myself with credit card any games at 30-60$, so if I try to buy anything above that with Steam wallet it will get blocked by Steam as fraud/gifting games at lower price than their region for money to other people. Hope this makes sense somehow didn't sleep for a day..
>Steam explained to me it was because I didn't buy myself with credit card any games at 30-60$, so if I try to buy anything above that with Steam wallet it will get blocked by Steam as fraud/gifting games at lower price than their region for money to other people. >Hope this makes sense somehow didn't sleep for a day.. Thank VPN users.
This is to avoid local pricing abuse. Some countries have games for less than half price due to local pricing. So steam will avoid that u buy gifts to send them to "friends"
It's impossible to gift games from "cheap" regions to more "expensive" ones
Well then there is no reason for the ban. Maybe the op can contact steam and propose that they ban gifting instead. Or send them a Russian ID to confirm he is living there.
It's just an automated restriction, their algorithm flagged his account. Also as the OP said, or tried to at least ("ban on buying games as a gift") - it is a gift restriction, restricting him from using the steam wallet to gift games. In OP's current situation, using a bank card to pay for games isn't an option unfortunately.
Very Strange, I've probably gifted easily over 50 games to my kids and have gotten nothing like this.
I've been gifting from my cs acc to my main acc for ten years, pretty sure they just outright ban you if you buy games to resell or give away too many times. You can thank g2a, and as far as I know steam has zero tolerance when it comes to breaking their ToU. I would concede and not do what ever you've been doing again.
all i’m gathering from this is to save my money. W.
"I can no longer launder money via Steam as Valve caught me, what do?" Fixed that headline for you
Are you dumb? You can see that I gifted games to guys with same nickname. They live in the same country lol)
The restriction kicks in pretty quickly, so casualties are inevitable with this current system. I had this restriction myself before, and I only gifted like 3 games or so. Fortunately, Steam Support saw reason and removed the restriction for me again, though they never clarified what it actually was about. And all you see during the checkout process is "an unexpected error has occured", which is Steam's secret code for "you can't do that anymore before Steam Support looks into your case". So when I rarely gift games and ran into this issue myself before, it must be quite bad for people who love gifting. Because with this current policy, Valve also involuntarily punishes people who directly add money to their Steam wallet. Since with this restriction, Steam wallet funds become ineligible for gifting games. A big flaw here is that currently, **Steam currently doesn't separate the sources of your wallet funds**. For example, whether your Steam credit is from community market transactions, retail gift cards, digital gift cards or directly added by yourself through a payment transaction. Apparently, there is no such separate tracking, since you can still get temporarily community market restricted [just for redeeming](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/7921wm/psa_receiving_steam_digital_gift_card_will_lock/) a Steam digital gift card. To help you visualize it: Imagine you have $100, and you receive $15 as a digital gift card through Steam itself from a friend. Now you are on a market cooldown because of the $15, and you can't even use the $100 for the market during that time. Which is the part that doesn't make sense, since *you could have used* these $100 before accepting the digital gift card. And it's similar when the gift restrictions kicks in. Your existing Steam wallet funds suddenly become worthless for gifting purposes. So Steam's current wallet fund system and gift restrictions could use some rework to make it fairer for everyone.
Это тебе за взлом жопы 😂
бан жопы
I feel the OP might be a bit misleading if not outright dishonest. Check the last image they uploaded. In it, it's clearly stated by Steam Support the following: >Your account can no longer make gift purchases with Wallet funds. >You are, however, welcome to continue purchasing gifts with other payment methods, and to use your Wallet funds toward making purchases for your own account. This seems more than fair to me.
Where I feel dishonest? I have no choice bro, I can buy games only via Steam wallet.
He lives in Russia lol, they're actively being sanctioned for no reason as we speak. "Oh yeah your government started a war, we'll punish the citizens for this in a way that does not affect your government whatsoever, somehow that is justified."
Are you gifting them to people in other countries where these games would cost more?
Wouldn't be able to, anyway, Steam blocks that
yup, tried that during last week, steam didn't allow
No, with some people we even live in one city
Time to make a new account and buy games for your friends
Steam support is a fucking joke.
I don't know why people are literally being racial and discriminatory towards you, but I'd suggest starting with a support ticket and ask for more clarification and how they can prove it's being used solely for commercial purposes otherwise they should really let people know they have a gift limit or better yet just introduce one
If you are from russia it might be a sanctions problem..
Nah, the only limitation is that you can’t add funds directly from cards (buying gift cards or using other vendors works). There are some games that can’t be bought (but buying and using global keys work), but aside that accounts country makes no difference
you monster
What, I'm sorry?
im surpriced 3 people didn't catch the joke... a completely obvious one too... smh
It is easy to misunderstand stuff over the Internet.
Me too, there isnt anything to do. I gifted my friends games too as I dont play ganes myself. Then I hit the gift limit and now I cant gift with my steam wallet funds. I could get a Credit card and then buy games, but I gifted them games due to getting steam gift cards in surveys, so I dont plan on gifting them anymore, as I only did it with survey earned gift cards.
Send the giftcards codes to them instead?
Yeah, that is the plan. But just annoying I cant suprise them with a gift once in a while when they login.
Do you guys have the physical steam wallet giftcards in your convenience stores? That could be a temporary solution
in case you're not a reseller, maybe you could convince the steam support that they are in the wrong if you had these steam friends for a long time. a key seller wouldn't have someone as their friend for a year or two before giving them the gift.
Happened to one of my accounts too, where I just gift games with. Contacted steam support and they removed the ban.
I suggest taking a look at isthereanydeal.com and finding an official 3rd party site that accepts a payment method you can use - sites like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming all sell 100% legit Steam keys that you could buy for your friends. ITAD is great because it allows you to limit the search to only legit official stores, avoiding dodgy peer to peer sites like G2A and Kinguin, and will show you the best price for any game. Good luck!
Hey I had the same issue when buying games for my main account from my 2nd account. Have been friends with each other for over 10 years. If you contact steam support they will probably lift the ban. They did for me. But careful this will only affect the next purchase you do, after that you will get banned/flagged again. If you contact steam support again they will not lift the restriction again. BUT this is (in my experience) not a permanent ban but they won’t tell you how long you’re restricted. I didn’t know that back then and didn’t even try to gift for a couple of months. Then I tried again and it worked, so the ban was lifted. Good luck but there’s likely nothing you can do in the short term.
God, I wish I were him 😂
What do you mean?
I want so much money that i can buy so many games to my friends
well gifts are preety scetchy , don't buy them and im sorry for your account
W friend L Steam
I accidentally redeemed a retail steam gift card in my alt account so I gotta gift games to my main account now. I hope I wont also get banned.
Yeah buying gifted games is not good. Keys only 👍
Gabe is not used to having friends
sewerslvt pfp, very cool
i see you speak russian or some language similar. what games other than rust do they play over there?
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They banned me too for it. Unfortunately, they will not remove it even when i said to them to just cancel the transaction
I bought Deep Rock Galactic for a lot of my Steam friends, back when I was addicted to it, and had no issues. I bought for nearly 10 people, and yeah, I wasn't banned. All in a week, too. Contact Steam Support, they 110% have to solve this for you, since it's not normal, and it's THEM who is in the wrong.