How to check a game account before you pay
Six things to verify before money moves, and the exact questions to ask. Most of them take under a minute, and each one kills a different way of losing the account.
Every way of losing a bought account has a check that catches it beforehand. None of them take long. Here they are in the order that matters.
1. Access type — before anything else
Ask which of the three you are getting:
- Full access — the original email comes with the account, and you can change it. The account becomes yours in the only sense that matters.
- Email changeable, original not included — you can move the account to your address, but the previous owner keeps a copy of the recovery trail.
- No email access — you get a login and a password. The person who created the account can take it back with one support ticket.
The third type is not a scam if it is stated on the card, and it is cheaper for a reason. It becomes a scam when it is not stated. If the listing does not say, that is your answer.
2. Does the content match the screenshots
Screenshots of a nice character prove nothing. What you want is the account data screen — the one showing level, region, and the item list. On our listings that data comes from the account itself rather than from the seller's description, but anywhere you buy, the rule is the same: a picture without account data is decoration.
3. Region and server
Permanent in almost every game, and free transfers are rare. Check it against where your friends play before checking anything else — a perfect account on the wrong server is the one mistake you cannot fix later.
4. How the progress was made
Ask directly: hand-levelled or bot-farmed. Bot-levelled accounts are the ones that disappear in ban waves, and the wave arrives weeks after the sale, when everyone has stopped paying attention.
A seller who levels by hand says so and usually prices accordingly. A seller who dodges the question has answered it.
5. What happens if it stops working
The question that separates platforms from strangers:
If this account is recovered by its previous owner in three weeks, who do I write to, and what do I get back?
A platform answers with a procedure and a window. A stranger answers with adjectives. On a classifieds site there is nobody to ask at all — which is the same answer in a different font.
6. Where the money sits until you confirm
If payment reaches the seller the moment you click buy, nothing else on the page matters. Escrow is not a feature, it is the difference between a purchase and a donation.
After you get the credentials
The first ten minutes decide whether the account stays yours:
- Change the password. Immediately.
- Change the email, if the listing includes access. This is the step that makes recovery by the previous owner impossible.
- Enable two-factor authentication.
- Do not log in from a second country the same day. Two logins from different regions within hours is the pattern automated systems flag.
- Only then confirm the order. Once you confirm, the money moves to the seller — that is the moment your leverage ends, so spend it wisely.
Where this fails anyway
Publishers forbid account transfers. No marketplace, ours included, can change that. What a marketplace can do is hold the money until you have checked, cover you for a stated window, and refuse listings that come from bot farms. What it cannot do is make the risk zero — and any platform claiming otherwise is telling you something it cannot back.
What gets checked before a listing appears is on the card of every shelf — start with Fortnite, League of Legends or CS2, and compare two listings by their data blocks rather than their descriptions.
READ NEXT
Buying an account is not a crime in the EU, the UK or the US — but it does break the publisher's terms, and those are two different questions with two different consequences. Here is which is which.
The same account at the same specification differs in price by half depending on one field. Here is what each access type means, and why the cheap one is not a scam — until it is unstated.
Escrow, fees, delivery speed and what happens when the account dies a week later — the four things that actually differ between platforms, and how the big ones handle each.