Developer Reveals Fake Coffee Shop Scamming For Free Games

Gamers have done some pretty weird stuff in the past in an effort to scam a few free keycodes from developers, but one developer took Imgur to air out his frustration with the latest elaborate scheme - a fake coffee shop.

Paradigm developer Jacob Janerka recapped his odd experience when dealing with a fake game-centric coffee shop that asked developers for free game keys to support their video game trivia nights, and other similar events. Which sounds great ... if it were true, but according to Janerka - the whole shop was a farce with no purpose other than to scam the industry.

According to Janerka's original post:

"Hi, my name is Jacob Janerka the developer of Paradigm and I would like to introduce you to "The Wacky Adventures of Steam Key Scammers" where the creative romanticism of making indie games gets smothered with a musty donut pillow a developer may use to avoid hemorrhoids while sitting down for an unhealthy amount of hours.

Our little journey begins with the apathetic deleting of hordes of fake Steam key request emails from fake emails, fake websites and fake enthusiasm. Normal scam emails are generally easy to spot; non specific greeting, clearly cookie cutter description of your amazing game, and of course 3-4 extra keys for the TEAM of eager writers from really legit websites with 2 visitors a day.

However a recent scam email caught my attention on how deep it went. Now I'm cool with people pirating my game, I prefer sales, but generally those people who pirate either cant afford it, or they weren't going to buy the game anyway or they will support my art in other ways. However it gets my nipples in a hot magenta pink rage when people profit from scammed keys on grey key markets like G2A. Here is the first email."

The original email can be found here, but the story continues as the convincing 'real-time' pictures were also attached, the ones seen at the top of this article. Janerka said he simply forgot to reply, "being the piece of shit I am" which prompted a follow up email including the coffee shop's Twitter and other supporting media.

The wild was a wild one, with Janerka constantly referring to his pink nipples, but it goes on to show off how the discovery of this fake shop was made and what exactly this developer did to handle it. He ended this adventure on a cheeky note stating:

"TL;DR Someone tries to scam me out of my Steam keys with semi believable story, I investigate, nipples get hot magenta pink. I find out its a scam through top notch realistic detective work."

So take that, scammers ...

(via Kotaku)