So it seems with the new Steam contest, you can complete objectives to earn prizes, coupons, or 'coals'. Coals by themselves are worthless, but if you earn seven of them, you can craft them into a free game. Additionally, the more coals you have in your inventory, the higher chance you have of winning the Steam ultimate prize: All the Steam games, plus hundreds of second prize winners.
Now here's where I take advantage of the situation. I have about 10 dummy accounts. I made them using different emails so they couldn't be traced to my primary email. But the thing you need to remember is that you need to own a retail game in order for an account to be authentic (ie you can't add friends or trade certain goods if you're not authenticated.) Additionally, in order to trade certain goods, your account has to be in good standing for 90 days (meaning it CAN'T have been banned). It's a good thing I created these accounts a long time ago.
I would have recommended buying the Humble Indie Bundle 4 for a penny (and I still do), but they caught on to this scheme, so now you need a minimum of 1 dollar to get a Steam key. Still, one dollar to authenticate is not that bad, that's ten dollars (well, for me it was ten cents American) to get 10 legitimate Steam accounts, which will pay off when you get coals to do with as you please. In addition, the money goes to a good cause, AND you get some Steam games which can help you get even more coals, so everyone wins and no one loses. So far I managed to complete about 7-8 objectives on each account, yielding six games, some coupons I probably won't use, and some coals to spare.
Really though, I don't know why people like to complain about this. Do these gamers realize that there now exists, even if temporarily, a 'coal economy'? With any economy there will always be farming of one sort or another. Do complainers think VALVe doesn't know about this? They wouldn't have made coals tradable if they knew it was a bad idea. There is nothing in the Terms against creating dummy accounts, despite what the retards on the Steam forums say.
All in all, there are some hardcore farmers out there who have a hundred accounts, I mean just look at this shit, this PEDXS guy has over 200 dummy accounts. Though they may have thousands of coals, they still could lose as the drawing is random. The chances of you actually winning are slim to none, so if you have fifty coals, you may as well craft them into something useful before they disappear in January.