>>719026209 (OP)
It's true but keys have nothing to do with it. Key prices are inflated by bots who just idle farm a fuck ton of items, which means there's a ridiculous amount of refined so keys necessarily increase as a result.
The ACTUAL manipulation is not happening at these lower tiers, but at higher levels of value. Pretty much any rare item is increasing in price at an alarming rate as of recent. Unusuals, specifically older ones (pre 2015) have doubled or tripled in price on average over time. Rare stranges like the gunslinger, original, PDA, machina, or frying pan, are all ludicrously expensive now (Strange gunslinger is >$500 now).
By far the most transparent market manipulation is happening with the 2011-2013 Halloween unusuals. For whatever reason, the group of people at the top level of trading are trading these hats between themselves and driving the prices to astronomical levels. The burning team captain isn't even close to the most expensive hat now and that's saying something. Even terrible hats, if they have one of those Halloween 2013 effects, get priced at $700 MINIMUM, on average being $1500-2000 or more, with the most expensive ones breaching $30k-40k. It's patently absurd and I don't know why more people don't realize what's happening. In effect all the items previously listed are in large part just being traded between whales, who then jack up the prices massively to boost their own value. It's a horrible time to be a collector of moderate value items like stranges because those are getting booted up.
The silver lining of course is if you actually have one of these items that are getting artificially boosted in price, you make a nice profit margin. If you recall opening any aforementioned items you can probably get hundreds of dollars for them now if you don't care about the game anymore. And the silver lining with key prices is that with a single key purchase you can get every weapon in the game plus a dozen or more cosmetics and be set.
