Valve adds CAPTCHA to Steam trading process

As part of its ongoing attempts to secure the Steam trading process and remove the opportunity for fraud, Valve has added a CAPTCHA as part of the confirmation process.

“This is to prevent malware on users’ machines making trades on their behalf,” explains the company in a community post.

“We know it’s a bit of a hassle, and we don’t like making trading harder for users,” writes Valve’s John Cook, “but we do expect it to significantly help customers who are tricked into downloading and running malware from losing their items.[br]

[/br] We’ve excluded a few of the existing third-party trading services from this requirement so they can continue to function.”

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Users are reporting that the new update has cancelled some of their in-process trades, so if you’ve got any on the go you might want to check to make sure everything is ship-shape. There are also apparently issues with the CAPTCHA system itself, with some users reporting that it doesn’t recognise the correct response.

According to Twitter account SteamDB (not affiliated with Valve), Valve has also just switched from their own CAPTCHA system to Google’s reCAPTCHA. This may have sorted some of those aforementioned issues out.