"shanls96;d-982918" wrote: I’ve just saw a tweet that says if you purchase through CDkEys you may get banned..
As far as I was aware, it was perfectly safe to buy through them as they are legit. Am I missing something?
They are not legit legit. They are a 3rd party. Not one allowed by EA. That said how they get their codes is not clear if legal or illegal. Some have said they’re account got banned for buying codes, but others buy and haven’t gotten banned. So there’s a chance you can get banned.
Correct, those sites don't often reveal where they get their keys from so there is a chance that they could have gotten them from people with fraudulent credit cards like for example someone buys a bunch of keys, gets the keys, then the money never goes through, EA gets nothing, and the keys then gets sold to those sites.
So the sites themselves may, or may not be illegal but it's possible that the people that they get their keys from are. And if this happens then those cdkeys will be flagged and often can't be used and if you purchased one you could get banned, it depends on what the publisher wants to do... From what I heard they are losing a lot of money on stolen keys (if you assume that the people who bought them would have bought them legally).
Other sites also purchase keys from other countries cheaper, which is also a grey area of what is allowed and not allowed because of trade laws.
From what I understand, CDkeys is the safest of the lot but you need to be careful with other sites. I think G2A for example operates like Amazon so anyone can put codes on there, sellers with lower rankings there's a high chance of dodgy codes but sellers with 99%+ are usually genuine.
CatBrat_Sims @CatBrat_Sims. 4h I literally only bought from CDKeys because I saw a post from a sim guru saying it’s okay to buy from them
However, this information seems to contradict this: https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/faq/where-to-buy-ea-games-v2/
CD Keys is not an authorized reseller.
At worst, though, banning appears unlikely. If stolen, EA states: Additionally, any illegally obtained games and Product Codes will be disabled by us, and access to the product will be lost.
But, as SimplyJen mentions, accounts can be banned for violating Terms of Service, including unlawful behavior.
"shanls96;c-17703969" wrote: hmm, I’m torn like I understand there’s evidence that a guru has stated it’s fine to use cdkeys..
yet some of the comments kinda have me 50/50 towards what is actually allowed
Have people confirmed that they have actually gotten banned? What most publishers do with stolen keys are that they treat them as stolen (which means that they can't resell them) and then they often work anyway unless the publisher decides to revoke those keys so you lose whatever you bought and they may ban the user as well but I'm not sure, that sounds pretty harsh.
I guess you have to check around and see if enough people trust CDKeys.
CDKeys is an unauthorized seller. It doesn't have the worst reputation out of all of em' but it's still not authorized so the risk is still there. This is a list of some trusted authorized retailers from the EA help page (besides buying straight from Origin):
Amazon France Amazon Germany Amazon Italy Amazon Spain Amazon UK Game UK GameStop EU North America
Amazon Best Buy GameStop Target Walmart
Note: Make sure you are buying from Electronic Arts as some of those sites listed also host third-party sellers on their websites alongside official sellers.
It's common on sites like CDKeys & G2A someone buys a bunch of keys in bulk with a stolen credit card and then sells those keys to the site. Eventually (even years later) a chargeback can happen which means EA can and will swoop in to void those codes. The account they are added to can become locked for violating TOS. So when you use these unauthorized sellers, be aware this can happen at any time and you are risking your account. These codes won't be voided immediately if they are fraudulent but it's also possible they are 100% legit... there's no way to tell. Just as an example, this happened to quite a few Sims 3 users a couple of years ago. Most of them purchased from eBay, G2A, but there were a few who used CDKeys.
