Valve Goes on Steam Banning Spree After the Summer Sale

After the latest Summer Sale on Steam, the system was taken over by a series of numerous bans, overpassing the previous banning records recorded per day. On July 5^th, one day after the sale was over, more than 40,000 Steam accounts were shut down.

Overwhelming number of banned Steam accounts

A third party tool is responsible with recording the number of bans issued every day on Steam. It seems that the automatic no-cheating system created by Valve reached the overwhelming number of 40,411 banned accounts the day after the Summer Sale ended.

This is a huge number, compared to the usual 3,000 or 4,000 users banned every day. In October 2016, Valve also scored a record when it banned 15,277 accounts in a single day. However, there is still a huge difference between that and the current banning record.

Many users resort to cheats during sales

These users have received a VAC ban, which no longer allows them to connect to the Valve servers. Therefore, all their items and purchases are now useless. During sales, many users acquire cheap game copies, and then create more accounts to see which of their hacks are detected by Valve.

This huge number of bans shows the anti-cheating system has improved, and is way better at detecting cheaters. Valve declared that, once you are the subject of a ban, the decision is irreversible. However, if it discovers the banning has been wrongful, you can be granted access to the servers again.

Apart from those VAC bans, 4,972 more users were banned. This happened on June 6^th, when other players reported the cheaters in-game. Then, the number of bans returned to normal. This banning spree led to the loss of in-game items and skins worth $9,580, without counting the price of the games which lost connection to the servers.
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