New research has revealed suspicious trading activity on Steam Marketplace that could suggest it is being used for money laundering purposes.
This is according to a recent study in the paper Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, which examined the use of secondary video game markets as potential sites for money laundering.
The study focused on transactions made in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, using publicly available data to identify “the frequency and quantity of transactions” over a five-day period in August 2020.
By collecting data including anonymous seller and buyer identifiers, item ID, value and transaction timestamp, the study examined “the frequency of peer-to-peer exchanges and item transactions” for signs of money laundering.
The study found that a small number of traders appeared frequently during this period, with four of them consistently appearing in the top ten buyers and sellers.
For example, the study found that the top ten sellers accounted for 4.5% of CS:GO transactions on the marketplace during this period.
The study found that these frequently appearing individuals indicated “either market manipulation or other activity [that] These sellers may be buying and selling at such a high frequency.
It concluded that by using “conventional money laundering indicators”, suspicious activities and behaviours can be identified on secondary video game markets and that, based on these findings, similar investigations could be conducted on other platforms.