We investigated the company behind Cdkeys, read through hundreds of customer reviews and bought a game key from Cdkeys so we could verify or dispute the negative customer reviews. By the end of this article, you’ll find out if Cdkeys is legit and safe to buy from or if it’s a scam.

Cdkeys FAQs

What is Cdkeys and how does it work?

We assume you already know what Cdkeys is, so we will keep this section brief. Cdkeys.com is a site where you can buy cheap game keys for many popular platforms such as PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. They also sell gift cards and top-ups, but game keys is their main product.

Is Cdkeys legal?

Cdkeys is basically a reseller, meaning that they don’t get authorized to sell game keys by game publishers directly. Because of this, they are considered “grey market retailer”. In simple terms, what that means is that they buy a game key from one individual and resell it to another individual, bypassing the game publisher who authorized the game key originally.

However, Cdkeys isn’t breaking the law by doing this, so for you, as a consumer, it doesn’t really matter where the game key came from originally. So as far as the law is concerned, Cdkeys is 100% legal.

Why is Cdkeys so cheap?

According to Cdkeys themselves, their products are cheap because “they have over 30 years of experience in the industry and have an established network of suppliers around the globe”. However, that doesn’t tell us much, does it?

From what we could find on the Internet, Cdkeys are buying keys from other countries where the price of games is much lower (ex. Russia) and resell them in countries where the price is much higher (ex. the US). The price difference in these countries can be quite substantial for the same products, which explains why their prices are so low.

Where is Cdkeys located?

Cdkeys is owned by Omnyex E-commerce DMCC, a leading independent wholesale & distributor of video games and video game related products across the globe. While Cdkeys.com is online based, Omnyex is located in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai.

Where does Cdkeys get their keys?

As we mentioned earlier, it is most likely that Cdkeys are buying most of their keys in bulk from 2nd and 3rd world countries where games are dirt cheap (such as Eastern Europe), and resell them in countries where the price of the games is much higher (such as the US).

What’s the Internet saying about Cdkeys?

We’ve looked at and analyzed hundreds of reviews on the Internet. You can find the major ratings and links to Cdkeys reviews below.

Based on a large number of Trustpilot reviews, we can conclude that Cdkeys has a pretty decent customer satisfaction rating. Ninety-six percent of all Cdkeys reviews are ranked average or better (3 stars or greater), with only 4% being rated as bad (2 stars or lower). However, we went ahead and analyzed the 4% of the complaints anyways to see what the most common issues are. You can read the summary of all the complaints below.

Most common Cdkeys complaints

Keys have been used/redeemed

This is the most common complaint. It looks like a small percentage of keys sold by Cdkeys may have been used/redeemed previously, so keep this in mind as a potential risk. When this happens, Cdkeys can refuse to issue a refund, stating that their policy allows them to refund only unused keys. Here’s what a typical response may look like.

Hi,

Thanks for your patience.

Upon verifying the key on this order, we found it to be already used/redeemed. Unfortunately, we’re able to refund only for unused key(s). To clarify, once the key/code is redeemed, it gets linked to the account permanently, and this cannot be undone in any way. Our normal policy, like most other retailers, is that we are unable to issue a replacement or refund on used digital goods as they were sent to your email, valid and unused.

Hope this explains the situation.

Kind Regards,

Tyron J,
Support Ace | cdkeys.com

We don’t want to scare you off, though. While this is definitely a risk, it seems to be relatively small because the vast majority of customers say they got a perfectly functional key and enjoyed playing their games.

Manual review and ID verification

This is the second most common complaint. Some people complained they were selected for a manual review which either took too long to complete or Cdkeys asked for some important documents such as a passport or a bank card which people weren’t comfortable providing. The wait time can be as little as an hour and sometimes as long as 24 hours or more. Cdkeys claims they randomly select some customers for a manual review in order to prevent fraud.

An unresponsive customer support team

This is the third most common complaint. A typical scenario was that Cdkeys support was unresponsive when someone ordered a key but it never arrived and it took a while to get through to the Cdkeys support team. Obviously, it can be very frustrating not to hear back from customer support, especially when they charged you for the service.

Buying a key from Cdkeys to verify the negative claims

Using Cdkeys filters to find a game

Cdkeys allows visitors to filter games by platform, genre, region, language and price. To find a game for the Cdkeys test, we set the filters to the following: PC platform, the US or worldwide region, English language, and the price under $5.

Even with such narrow filters, we were left with 61 products to choose from. Because we are making this purchase just for the sake of testing the Cdkeys checkout process, we decided to get Anthem DLC for a small price of $1.09.

Cdkeys checkout process & ordering

Step 1: Click on “Buy Now”

Step 2: Proceed to the checkout page. We used PayPal as a payment method.

Step 3: Place your order.

Step 4: Get the confirmation page with your order ID.

Step 4: Get the download link in your email. We received the email right after placing the order.

Step 5: Verify your phone. We were taken to the phone verification page after clicking on the download link.

Step 6: Get your serial code.

Step 7: Redeem your product code.

Step 8: Confirm your activation code.

Step 8: Enjoy your purchase!

As you can see, we didn’t have any issues ordering from Cdkeys and the serial key that we purchased was valid and worked as intended. We couldn’t verify the responsiveness of the customer service because there was no need for us to contact the customer service in the first place. However, if you ever need to contact their customer service, you can find their email address and a contact form here.

Conclusion

We analyzed Cdkeys to answer the question, is Cdkeys legit? Based on our analysis of the numerous third-party customer reviews and our personal experience ordering from Cdkeys, we’ve come to the conclusion that Cdkeys is a safe and legit reseller. While there is a 4% chance that a key you order from Cdkeys might be invalid, the rock-bottom prices make it worth the risk unless you want to buy your games at a full price.

Things we like about Cdkeys

• Very cheap prices that are hard to beat
• Large selection of games and gift cards
• Great filters for finding games you need
• Immediate delivery, we didn’t need to wait
• PayPal as a payment option

Things we don’t like about Cdkeys

• There is a small chance (about 4%) that the key you order from Cdkeys might be invalid. We came up with the 4% number by analyzing the ratio of positive reviews to the number of people who complained about their key being invalid.
• Cdkeys is a grey market retailer. This is purely an ethical issue and it may not apply to everyone. Cdkeys isn’t authorized by game publishers to sell games and they buy their game keys from other countries with a lower cost of living, but they don’t seem to be breaking the law by doing this and there is no legal risk for the consumer because the consumer has no way of knowing the true origin of the games they buy.

The final words

Have you tried Cdkeys? Tell us your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

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