I have been sold a pirated copy of Stardew Valley here yesterday, i never bought from itch.io before yesterday but after receiving an email from isthereanydeal.com that the game is on sale and then checking out itch.io i thought i got lucky finding a nice deal on the game. The Purchase page seems already been removed from itch.io but the game is still in my library, inside the .rar file are 2 links to a website that offers cracked games....

For a first time buyer this is not a good experience and i doubt i will purachse more games here.

Hello,

Sorry for the inconvenience. We sent out an email to everyone that got affected about getting a refund.

A scammer created a handful of accounts on our system and uploaded pirated games to it. Due to the nature of being an "open marketplace" we don't have a forced review before allowing people to publish. We were made aware of the scammer by the community and through our own internal review, and we removed the content as soon as we discovered it.

Since we're an open marketplace, there have been attempts at scamming in the past, but we tend to always catch them before anything happens. This time was a bit different.

There are websites that constantly scrape our site, and they noticed these "sales" the instant they went up and sent out notifications to people who had subscribed. This happened in a matter of minutes. This caused a handful of unsuspecting people to go and purchase these pages after getting an email notification a deal.

As with all scammers we suspend their accounts immediately, ban their payment information from the system, and ban those files from being sold.

This particular scammer is also taking advantage of a "direct payment" mode that we originally offered that allows a seller to skip itch.io and sell directly into their PayPal account. Although this might be nice for some some sellers, it means they're essentially getting away with the money without allowing us to intervene. We're going to be heavily restricting this feature of the site for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for understanding

So far i did not receive an email. Thanks for the clear up and being open about it tho.