[UPDATE: A G2A spokesperson has provided additional effort on the company's efforts to stop the selling of stolen keys. It is at the bottom of this post.]

Over the years that the company has operated its key-selling website, G2A has gradually become one of the most controversial marketplaces in the entire video game industry, with countless accusations thrown its way surrounding fraudulent acts, morally devoid advertisement schemes, and even several attempts to bribe journalists. The company has, however, consistently claimed that its services aren't as morally corrupt as many have accused them of being, to the extent of often making grand promises that it can prove its innocence.

As it turns out, G2A was actually taken up on that offer by a developer, with the marketplace launching a private investigation following the studio accusing the site of selling stolen keys that originally belonged to them. Unsurprisingly, the investigation discovered that G2A had in fact been selling the developer's stolen keys, catching the site red-handed.

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The developer in question was a small studio called Wube Software, who contacted G2A following the site's offer that it would pay any developer who could prove keys for its games being sold on the site were originally stolen 10x the value of the missing codes. While G2A was clearly confident that its investigation would turn up very few results, almost amusingly, it turned out that out of the 326 codes Wube Software had reported stolen, the marketplace had distributed 196 of them to customers. Following the discovery, G2A paid Wube Software a whopping $39,600, alongside issuing an apology and swearing that, in the future, it will try to be better at catching stolen codes.

In a statement, G2A claimed "When we launched this offer, we wanted to send a clear message to the gaming community that fraud hurts all parties. As we spell out in this blog, fraud directly hurts individuals who buy illegitimate keys, it hurts gaming developers and it ultimately hurts G2A because we are forced – as the transaction facilitator – to cover costs related to the sale. we want to continue building bridges... we will compensate developers the full value of any chargeback fees they incurred for any keys sold via G2A's marketplace, if they are able to prove they were illegitimate."

While the idea of compensating developers for illegitimate keys is undeniably a strong first step, many have rightly pointed out that G2A is still trying to steer clear of accepting the blame for the incident, claiming that they too are a significant victim of fraudulent sellers because they have to compensate developers. The fact sellers can still put illegal keys easily on G2A shows that the site has significant issues that it needs to sort out, perhaps by implementing new security measures that better vet which codes can be sold on the marketplace. Until then, G2A has no place playing the victim card.

A G2A spokesperson has provided the following info on security:

“Over the last few years we have taken extensive steps to beef up our seller verification process, leveraging proprietary AI technology, and human expertise, to ensure we are protecting our users.”

“As a result of these efforts, less than 0.02% of codes sold across our site are thought to have been obtained illegitimately. For a major online marketplace of digital products, this represents an industry-leading fraud detection rate, but for us it’s still not good enough. We are fully determined to eradicate the sale of any stolen keys from our market, that is why we are continuing to invest significant sums of money towards developing new anti-fraud technology. As we continue with these efforts, we are asking the developer community to tell us about any keys that they know have been obtained illegitimately, so that we can check our site records and have them taken down immediately.”

“We would be the first to admit that, in our formative years as a company, we took too long to recognize that a small number of individuals were abusing our Marketplace. However, the criticism we received was the wake-up call we needed, and over the last years we have been totally committed to tackling any incidents of fraud on our site. Today we some of the most sophisticated proprietary anti-fraud AI technology of any online marketplace for digital products.”

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Source: G2A.com