I'm aware that this topic has been touched upon before, but I feel the need to start the argument again considering the popularity of these deals. Personally I believe that all sites selling Russian keys which are incapable of being activated on platforms such as Steam without the use of third party tools be outright banned from the site.
There are some serious concerns about merchants posting these authorized CD key reselling websites, and people blindly upvoting the deal and downvoting the people who explain the risks, (I highly suspect these sites are using sockpuppets, which wouldn't be out of the question considering the shady nature of what they do) despite the fact there are potential serious drawbacks when they're used: needing to activate through a VPN spoofing your region, UI being in Russian, needing to download an external language pack, DLC being region-locked by publishers, Valve contacting people asking for photographic evidence of the game box, and in some cases publishers removing the game from your library later on and/or Valve banning accounts that have had these keys added to them via VPNs.
These types of sites are already banned on most major gaming deal sites. For example, here's two prominent gaming communities that have already implemented wide bans on these type of sites: Neogaf (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/) and the /r/gamedeals portion of Reddit. (http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedeals)
Here's some views on actual game developers who have had experience with these types of sites:
-BlimBlim, http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=32558741&postcoun…
Also one thing that's very important to note regarding key bannings. Quite a few sites (no idea if they have been listed here or not) with very good customer ratings and everything actually sell stolen keys. And by stolen I mean "credit card" fraud stolen.
Back at the launch of a game we had the exclusivity on, we were naive enough to disable our fraud screening system, and got hundreds of keys stolen over a period of just a few hours. Just for a test we tried to by a key from one popular bargain priced key sites, and yep it was a key from our batch. The amazing thing is that it had only be a few hours between the fraud and when we tried buying it. It was easy to find since we were the only one in the world who could sell the product for one week.
Of course all these keys have been blacklisted immediately, so it could also be the case with these RU BF3 keys. I don't really know though.<
-Unknown Worlds, http://unknownworlds.com/blog/beware-shady-key-resellers-and…
We deactivated these keys because they keys were purchased with credit cards where the card-holder initiated a “charge-back.” A charge-back is a consumer protection mechanism offered by payment companies such as Visa, allowing a card-holder to dispute a charge on their credit card statement. This means we never received payment for the game. In fact, we were charged a fee by the card issuer for the charge-back. For these 1,341 keys, these fees totalled around $30,000.
We don’t know how exactly these sites obtain their Steam keys. It seems likely that they were originally obtained from our store using stolen credit card information. Keys were then sold through a handful of questionable sites to people using legitimate credit cards. The owner of the stolen credit card ultimately disputed the charge and we lost the sale. In total, we lose ~$45 per transaction of this kind, due to the charge-back fee (~$22 fee + $25 game price). Meanwhile, the unauthorized key reseller kept the money from the player who ultimately received the bad key.<
Every time something like this gets posted, a bunch of people come out of the woodwork to defend these sites as 'perfectly legal'. I think it would be terribly hilarious if all these CD key sites were actually some fairly complex money laundering scheme.