Team Fortress 2 – Scam Method: The Tournament Vote Scam

The Scam Itself:

 
Starts off as your typical Steam convo between friends: 
 
An old friend messaged me out of the blue; 
 
B.P: yo, can you help me out? 
 
Joseph Mother: with what? 
 
Here’s where the scam starts to come into play; 
 
B.P: my friend is playing in a team in a tournament and i need you to vote for his team, i’ll give you one key or something for voting. 
 
Joseph Mother: sure 
 
B.P: ok, 
(links to obvious scamsite) 
his team is called the giant. 
 
So, as soon as a random link enters into any chat convo i’m having, I go a little on edge, like I assume many do. The first thing I try doing is googling the website. When I do, a wikipedia page comes up for the tournament. The first line of it confirmed my suspicions. “Blast Pro series was a tournament…”. 
 
Key word “was”. 
 
Then promptly followed by “The tournament series was discontinued in favor of the league-style BLAST Premier, which began in early 2020.” 
 
This is when the scam starts to fall apart, call them out, get immediately unfriended, all contact seizes instantly. 
 
 

What to do when faced with this method of scam:

 
Pretty simple stuff, just remember to always do a bit of research on something if you get that gut feeling that things aren’t legit. Even if you don’t get that and have a terrible sense of judgement, just do it anyways. It always helps to be thorough. 
 
If they try to add you: 
 

• After seeing their intentions, just unfriend and block the person. A good rule to follow generally is to not add random people who friend you *duh*.

 
In the case of old friends: 
 

• Like what happened to me, they almost assuredly got their accounts hijacked themselves with this exact scam. It’s really a shame that it happens, it’s happened to me at least five times already with my old tf2 buds.

Don’t you just F*cking hate scammers?

 
Aye, me too lad, me too. Here’s one to all the poor bastards who fell victim to their crimes. Whether through impaired judgement or sheer idiocy, they shall always be missed. 
 
 

Edits/Change Log:

 
March 4th, 2021: 

• The guide is done and published!

• Fixed some minor spelling errors.

 
April 18th, 2021: 

• I previously had this guide titled as “New Scam Method: The Tournament Vote Scam”. This was a mistake on my part. After reading and replying to a couple of comments of people who had previously experienced this scam up to a year prior before making this guide, I have decided to change the title. Easy fix for a simple mistake.

• Fixed minor grammar and spelling errors.

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