So honestly, get stuffed with that attitude. We can't all afford to blow essentially a weeks worth of grocery money on a ridiculously overpriced CD key. Maybe if companies don't want people buying keys off eBay or dodgy key sites they shouldn't charge extortionate amounts for digital versions that should if anything, be even cheaper nowadays.
Look, this might sound crazy, but maybe, people don't "actually need" to play the video game.
This is like the halfway point between people buying games full price, and people pirating them. Too cheap (or literally cannot afford) to buy it full price (or at least from the official/licensed source), but can't morally rationalize paying nothing, so by paying "someone" something it soothes their conscience, not questioning the source of their savings as that would risk the moral rationalization they just achieved.
Like really, you're arguing some people can't afford to buy games at full price, and that's the company's fault for charging so much for them. Do you know how/why games are priced as they are? Or why regional pricing is the way that it is (and how it gets exploited to provide richer countries cheap keys)?
It's a reflection on the average wealth of the citizens of the country it's being sold in. Finding the right balance between not making it "too" expensive (as to place it out of the price range of your average person and push them towards piracy) and not making it expensive enough (whereas you could increase the price, and your profit, without putting it out of reach of the average person).
The United States, relative to the rest of the world, is quite wealthy, even if for many people's personal experiences it doesn't feel like it at times. So because of this, keys here are going to be sold for a fair bit higher than countries like Russia and whatnot, because overall as a country, they can afford it. The reason those "ridiculous overpriced" keys are cheaper in other countries is precisely because on average, they could not afford it at the 1:1 exchange rate price. So for that region it gets adjusted down into "average person" level pricing, in order to encourage "some" sales and try to recoup any money they can, along with discouraging piracy.
However, in steps a site like CDKeys.com, that realized that by buying up large amounts of these foreign region keys and reselling them in territories like the US, they could undercut the official MSRP while still maintaining a healthy profit, all the while devaluing the cost of games in people's eyes because they become so accustomed to buying them cheap.
Now, my tangent is semi-unrelated to all this (I apologize), considering it's about people reselling promotional keys, but that comes with it's own giant set of baggage.
Rather than accept that people could not afford to buy a game at the suggested price, they decide to take the risk on buying from someone who was never authorized to sell it, in the hopes that it'll all just work out in the end. Saying that "He was selling it for $45 not $10 so I didn't think it was sketchy" is the wrong attitude for people to have. Unless it's coming from someone authorized to sell the keys/product, it's always going to be "sketchy". I could sell the key for $1 or $59 and it wouldn't make a bit of difference how "trustworthy" I really am, but the higher the number the more "legitimate" it makes me look. I'm not any more legit than anyone else. I'm just taking a hit (or even potentially a gain) to my own profit to try and convince people I'm the "safer" sketchy source of keys.
If you still can't seem to afford to wait until you can, well, afford it and would rather take the gamble on the used/second hand/resold product in order to get it RIGHT NOW, you best be sure you are taking every single precaution you can to protect yourself in the event it goes south. Never Paypal F&F, always at least question the source (even if they don't always answer), paper trail the entire way. No amount of positive feedback makes a seller 100% safe. There is always the chance that this'll be the day they decide to fuck someone over. And that someone could be you. And as mad as you might be that you got had, it will be entirely on you that you didn't use the options available to you to protect yourself.
Video Games.
