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A lot of these keys are obtained through scams where the scammer pretends to be some famous YouTube or Twitch personality promising to review your game. When yo

A lot of these keys are obtained through scams where the scammer pretends to be some famous YouTube or Twitch personality promising to review your game. When you're an indie struggling to make a living, sometimes you go for things that sound too good to be true. Also, giving a smaller YouTuber one or two keys isn't much skin off a gamedev's nose, if legitimate. There are also stolen or leaked keys, but those are likely to be the minority of cases (though they may be greater in volume due to the sheer amount of keys they might have).

BubRoss 7y ago
It isn't even so extreme. As soon as you start to sell something you get people trying to get free keys from you for all sorts of reasons. They say they are students, from a poor country, going to review it, trade you for other keys, and on and on. Then people will also buy it and complain immediately about anything to get the money back. Basically people start trying to scam you from day 1.