this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Piracy: κ±α΄ΙͺΚ α΄Κα΄ ΚΙͺΙ’Κ κ±α΄α΄κ±
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I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers and acted like Karma was watching (as in, I donβt want my credit card stolen, so I wonβt benefit from those of others).
I always assumed it was largely money laundering.
Claim to have bought a key for 1$ sell it for 10$. Declare you made a 9$ profit. In reality there was never a key for 1$. You bought a 10$ key with dirty money and are selling it at cost.
Fundamentally no different to the mafia run pizza place.
So how do one of theses sites have not already been taken down by law enforcement?
Why haven't vinted, ebay or for that matter facebook been taken down by law enforcement?
Indie game devs are bombarded with free game requests.
I read about one indie dev who woke up to a dozen emails a day asking for a game key to "twitch stream" their game.
It becomes extremely exhausting to verify every single one, and so many just hand it off and hope that one emailer really is who they say they are and they suddenly get a shitton of sales.
Can confirm, I get emails daily.
To add to that, if they are using stolen payment info, then they'd probably have no qualms about stealing yours too
Crazy thing, but my credit card info was recently stolen and after closing it, making compensation claims for my bank and filing a offence report to the police I contacted the three different online store the card was used with.
The only one that responded was a key seller and they even refunded me the money.
Maybe they're workinh in such a grey area that they want to avoid all possible legal trouble?
Jeez, which country is this that you need to do this much work to deal with credit card fraud?
I was quite surprised as well, when my card was stolen I called discover and they just charged back the transactions, granted they said it would be reinstated if their internal investigation proved to be a fake claim but, they got insurance from the feds for stuff like that, so they don't need to care too much.
I was really surprised to read a while back that in the UK, for instance, the account holder is responsible if their bank card gets fraudulent charges from hacking, skimming, etc.