Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, also known as CS:GO, is a multiplayer first-person shooter game where players join either the terrorist team or the counter-terrorist team and compete against each other. As of August 12th, 2015, Valve has brought over $78 million in revenue from skin sales alone. Players purchase crates that contain different skins for their various weapons such as knives, pistols and rifles. Those same skins can be sold on one of many third party websites like BitSkins and WaxPeer.
You don’t need to play Counter Strike: Global Offensive to sell your skins; all you need is an existing Steam account to deposit your skins into, and a skin link that you can copy/paste to advertise your goods. You can receive either more or less of the total value of what you sell depending on how fast you are at selling them. This is how it works:
Selling CSGO skins
Profiting from Skins
Similar to how some users run sites where they play CSGO gambling games, there are also sites that allow people to gamble their skins. They do this by allowing the user bet their items on different games where there are multiple outcomes. One example would be a coin flip for between 7-15 times with each being able to be selected as an option. The user places their bet then flips coin (which will only show the result after the user clicks “flip”) and if they win, then it is multiplied by how many times that number was selected. The site takes a cut of the profit made off the users bets which is how these sites make their money. A person can go on these websites to gamble with items they are willing to lose or they can sell their skins for betting points in order to bet.
There are many sites similar to this one where people can trade or play games with their CSGO skins. They have rules in place which forbid people from selling accounts, selling payed-for items, selling gift wraps/cards/keys or selling hardware such as keyboards and mice. Despite having rules against these things, there are many cases of all of these things happening. This past December, two people were caught selling $26,000 worth of CSGO skins for $21,700 in USD on one site. The most common way that people gain items illegally is through buying them with stolen credit cards or rewards points they gained by committing fraud under false names.
Preventing Fraud
A person can prevent themselves from being scammed by how they sell their skins and how they trade for other goods. When selling goods on the Steam marketplace, it is advised to use any payment service besides PayPal because if someone buys an item off of you using PayPal then requests a chargeback then gets their money refunded while keeping your weapon skin, nothing will be done about it except the loss of your skin and the value of the item. The same thing can happen when trading for skins; if you ever trade or receive a weapon in a trade that is not in your inventory then you will be out that weapon whether it gets reported or not. In conclusion, the only safe way to sell items on Steam is by trading them one-for-one or selling them for money either through PayPal, any debit/credit card, an exchanger website such as coinbase.com , bitcoin.org or skrill .
In some cases, people have had their accounts hacked into and sold all their rare skins without their consent while they were logged onto their account via a shared computer [3]. This has happened more than once even with popular streamers such as PhantomL0rd. It is advised to take advantage of how Steam lets you add a “phone number” to your account in order to receive security codes that can be used for logging into your account when there is something suspicious about the location or computer it’s being used on. If this code was not received then try having someone else log into their account while you are logged into yours on the same computer and have them force send a new log-in code.
What Can CSGO Skins Be Used For?
The skins in CSGO serve no practical purpose except for gaining small amounts of XP towards your profile rank, however they are intended for visual aesthetics only which makes owning rare skins an expensive hobby among FPS gamers. Some people have been buying and selling these items for a lot of money which has caused skins to rise as high as the price of CSGO’s cheapest weapon ($100) with some being worth more than 10 times that amount. In some cases, it is possible to buy a skin cheaper from someone else then sell it back on the steam marketplace for a higher price, especially with rare knives going up in value recently.
In Conclusion
Selling skins can become a problem if you do it how other people recommend and how the general public normally thinks of how to sell their CSGO skins. This method is dangerous and could get your steam account hacked or banned. There are better ways to sell such as selling through legitimate website exchangers such as coinbase, skrill , bitcoin .org or selling one-for-one through the Steam market place.
