As a retired trader, I've gone somewhat far and have seen quite a lot. Using my experience, and a bit of others too, I plan to share what I know. These are the safety trading rules I follow, following them is a great way to stay safe. Obviously everyone should know the basic trading rules, right? If not, here is how it goes:

• Be nice, being rude garners a bad reputation
  
• Make a decent profit, but at the same time don't take advantage of traders
  
• Patience is the main game, being impatient can have consequences

This is a basic list for trading in general, but staying safe has a lot of things you can do. Scammers are everywhere, it's a known fact. Scammers will take advantage of their situation, easily grabbing items using dumb schemes that many, frankly quite surprising, fall for. Knowing I've been through some scamming attempts, here are some dumb situations they usually follow the scammer winning the your items, if you aren't careful.
To avoid Paypal, either find another way to trade, use a middleman, or deny the offer. Paypal is very risky. Never have a person say there friend is a middleman and accept this offer, the situation often involves a middleman that would take the items and give them to the other person once the money has been paid, the only thing being that the "middleman" is either another person working with this scheme or the same person. Make sure the "friend" is a genuine middleman.

Before going over the rest of the safety trading guide, I wanted to clarify. Duped hats are a dangerous situation, don't worry though - duped hats cannot be made anymore. I won't explain the history behind them, but traders don't want these, or will take them for a large discount. Usually, a item's level or it's backpack.tf history will show it's duped. Here is an example on backpack.tf, make sure this hat doesn't have this warning:



Another common complaint with trading is inventory. If a person is selling you a high-priced unusual but has a mediocre inventory (ex. two weapons, free-to-play items, achievement items, only a gibus), it might be a scammer. To check if the person is truly a scammer, find them on Steam Rep, use Backpack.tf to check their backpack history. Check the item's history, which is an option found when you highlight the item in their inventory. I've highlighted the history option so you know exactly where it is:



Scamming comes in many different forms, the most notorious one would be URL scams. URL scams are scams involving an edited URL of a Steam Community page. When you try to interact with it, it forces you to sign in. Following multiple rules, this can easily be avoided:

• Make sure the URL is spelled correctly, don't log in if it says "steamcornmmunity".
  
• Click on random things on the page, if they don't work as intended, the page is fake
  
• People will scam you by saying "there friend wants to add you and trade" and will send a fake URL
  
• Make sure the URL has a certified green looking button by the URL, Steam even warns you about this every time you click on a link

Backpack.tf is an odd website to me, I still don't understand how prices are made, but I still manage to follow them. As a recommendation, it's best to believe prices of items that are common, like hats, misc, weapons, and promo items. Backpack.tf constantly updates key, bud, and refined prices, it's best you follow these prices. As for unusual hats, I wouldn't follow these too often. When unusual effects first come out, and this also goes for any items that have first come out, never trust a price set on a new items/effects on Backpack.tf. It will constantly change until the community and Backpack.tf can sync to one single price.



Backpack.tf can also be used to put a base price on things you want to sell on the Steam Community Market, often times though, people will just go with whatever price seems right. Wanna know what that is? Inflation! Anyways, make sure that everything you trade with is on par with price on Backpack.tf. It's recommend to trade with new items two weeks after they have come out, unless you want a profit due to high demand. This goes well with new weapons that come out.

A buyout trade is when some will sell a mass amount of something in return for something else, or money. I'll stick with explaining inventory buyouts, which are one of the most unluckiest trades ever on TF2, which of course doesn't count scams. Inventory Buyout trades often have one person wanting an item from your inventory, in return for their entire (tradeable) inventory. The risk with this is that you'd have to sell most, if not all the items in the inventory in order to get a profit. This takes a link time, prices will change, and not everyone will pay full price for the value of the item. Usually do this if he can accept overpay with your items (usually half a bud to a bud of overpay), or when the unusual offers are very good (by means of price, and demand for the hat).

Even though this site is extremely controversial in prices, it's highly recommend you use Backpack.tf in order to get a soft estimate of prices when trading on the market. If you overpayed for an unusual, very rarely will it sell, or just take a long time. There are four types of people on the Steam Community Market, you might want to keep in mind these type of people:

• People who buy hats for the looks
  
• People who buy hats for the profit
  
• People who buy hats as gifts
  
• Scammers or people who put hats at extremely low prices (quick sells)

People who buy hats for the looks will spend endless amounts of money, this means you are free to put a price on a hat, as long as there is a market for it. Let me give you an example:

People who buy hats for profit will either get hats that are several dollars under price, or buy hats a bit over a certain price, and sell the hat for a small amount (or large) of money then what they paid for. Let me give you an example:

Now, the situation for people buying things as gifts is similar to the first situation. They will often times spend more money on a hat when the value of the hat is much less then what they bought it for.


Now, the last option comes in two situations: the scammers sells for a low price, or a person is desperate to get something with money so he/she sells the hat for little over the price of what they want. Let me go with the first situation first:
How do I detect a scammer on the Steam Community Market then? Easy. Depend on their profile, use websites like Steam Rep in order to check if their profile is safe, especially since scammers usually make their page private. I'll include the Steam Rep link in case anyone needs it. If you plan on trading/buying/selling on the Market, use Steam Rep:
To further found out whether the seller is a scammer, look at the following:

• When the seller joined Steam
  
• The level, levels were made on Steam to show how much dedication a person has to their profile, let me further explain. Badges are basically your only source to further your level. Badges usually require money, or a mass amount of trading in order to craft them. Scammers try to spend as little time as possible on their account.
  
• What games the scammer has played, especially since most play free-to-play games
  
• As a recommendation, it is best to trade/buy things from people who are above level 8-12.

Level 20 and above is trustworthy.

As for people who sells things to in order to get things they want (like games, or when there is a sale, or another item they want), they will sell their items for a price similar to what they want. Their profile usually looks like a regular persons profile, often times a somewhat high level. Follow the guidelines above if you feel they are suspicious.

If you want to buy a hat, check the price on Backpack.tf, make sure to follow the slight warning on the guide above, but just in case - never buy things that have just come out. Anyways, a brief price will/should be put on unusual hats, depending on price. If there is no price set, you will have to take a risk. I cannot help you with unusual effects that have no price set, you will have to depend on what people sell it for on average by checking on TF2OP, TF2TP, and the Steam Community Market

If you want to sell a hat, check the price on Backpack.tf, make sure to check the price of the hat. If the price of the hat says 40$, sell it for 42$, never start with a large overpay, this will make buyers want to stay away from your hat (unless they really want a hat for looks or is in high demand). If you see people selling hats with their effects in really high prices (ex. Modest Pile of Hat with Nuts & Bolts sells 30$ over it's regular price), either wait for the price to go down (you avoid inflation), or put a price similar to those, but slightly under (ex. 89$ instead of 90$). Keep in mind that prices will change constantly, use the graph to compare prices. If you buy a hat for 90$ and people only sell for 89$ + Steam Tax, you will have to either wait for the hat to go up in price on either value or Steam Community Market value, or lose profit by selling the hat at the average price.

Often times, people will want to trade items from another game for TF2 items or vice versa. In order to stay safe from these trades, you need to check what game the item is from, how popular it is in terms of demand, and what you are getting from this. Each game has it's own unique way of trading.

For this part of the guide, I will constantly mention TF2 Calculator, use this for all non-TF2 trades.

This will only work with Steam Community Market prices. Take the price of the non-TF2 item in cash, using the Steam Community Market's price, and put it in the "USD" slot, the cash will then be converted into ref, buds, keys, etc. Determine the price of what you are selling in order to get this items and see if the price matches.

To check for prices, use TF2 Calculator. Here is an example of how trading with the Steam Community Market prices work:
Because of my inexperience with Dota items, you will largely have to depend on other guides or other sources to get a good amount of information. Following the example above is also a good way to get a decent profit. You can also use backpack.tf for Dota 2 items:
Because keys for Counter-strike, Dota, and TF2 are all the same in price, the value for each key is the same as the amount of refined for a TF2 key. Use the example below:
You will need to depend on other sources, the price of the said item and it's equivalent price with TF2 currency in order to make a decent trade. This guide does not support other game trading with other games (ex. Dota 2 items for Battleblock Theater items).

• Guide is released