Counter-Strike: Global Offensive container keys, which are purchased with real money and used to unlock the game's equivalent of loot boxes, can no longer be resold. In other words, the keys will not be able to leave the purchasing account, thus making it impossible to sell them on the Steam Community Market.

The reason? Valve has learned that they're being used to launder money. "In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers," the company wrote on the Counter-Strike website. 

"However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable."

The statement adds that while some (but clearly not many) legitimate users may be affected, "combating fraud is something we continue to prioritize across Steam and our products".

Valve also notes in its statement that "pre-existing CS:GO container keys are unaffected–those keys can still be sold on the Steam Community Market and traded."

It's a big deal to have Valve directly acknowledge that keys are being used for money laundering, and of course, it's not the first time CS:GO's reward systems have been used in shady ways. CS:GO skin gambling came under the spotlight in 2016 when two prominent YouTubers were found to be heavily promoting without disclosure their own skin lottery website. Valve gave chase, issuing more than 20 cease-and-desist orders against similar sites, but that didn't stop the Washington State Gambling Commission from getting involved.

In response to looming regulation in France, last month a CS:GO update introduced a new X-ray Scanner for that country, which basically allows users to check the content of containers before they're unlocked. 

A new AI built to combat toxicity in online gaming has banned 20,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players within its first six weeks, solely by analyzing messages in the game's text chat.

The AI is called Minerva, and it's built by a team at online gaming platform FACEIT—which organised 2018's CS:GO London Major—in collaboration with Google Cloud and Jigsaw, a Google tech incubator. Minerva started examining CS:GO chat messages in late August, and in the first month-and-a-half marked 7,000,000 messages as toxic, issued 90,000 warnings, and banned 20,000 players. 

The AI, trained through machine learning, first issued a warning for verbal abuse if it perceived a toxic message, while also flagging spam messages. Within a few seconds of a match finishing, Minerva sent notifications of either a warning or a ban to the offending player, and punishments grew harsher for repeat offenders.

The number of toxic messages reduced from by 20% between August and September while the AI was in use, and the number of unique players sending toxic messages dropped by 8%. 

The trial started after "months" of eliminating false positives, and it's only the first step in rolling out Minerva to online games. "In-game chat detection is only the first and most simplistic of the applications of Minerva and more of a case study that serves as a first step toward our vision for this AI," FACEIT said in a blog post. "We’re really excited about this foundation as it represents a strong base that will allow us to improve Minerva until we finally detect and address all kinds of abusive behaviors in real-time."

"In the coming weeks we will announce new systems that will support Minerva in her training."

Thanks, PCGamesN.