My question would be if the recipients of the gifts were in the same pricing zone as the account owner.
If they were in the same zone I can see no possible business reason why Valve would object to it, once they found that it wasn't fraud.
HOWEVER, legally it gets into the grey zone of money laundering, though it is laughable at such tiny amounts! :)
If the person was gifting games across pricing zones (can you do that?) in return for cash it gets very complicated and I can see Valve objecting to this as a way of getting around, say euro and dollar pricing.
Yes you can, I was once gifted a game by someone from different zone.
Also, the pricing zones aren't that much about euro/dollar as they are about distributors (some of them at least). They are no different from music/movie distributors. I would understand that in the case of Skyrim for example, where the Russian version is much cheaper. But I really don't understand why some distributors make games cheaper in US than in Europe, considering the Europe is well bellow the USA in purchasing power. And if I remember correctly, Australians got the most expensive games of all.
We can only be happy that there are no zone restrictions as there are on DVDs. Or are there?
Europe is below USA in purchasing power in part because things are more expensive here. Things like games.
There are a whole bunch of reasons: a less competitive market; less scale; complying to country-specific details - everything from translation to censorship schemes to VAT; less price sensitivity; different sales channel setup (game publishers may not want to undercut the physical sales channel by discounting Steam games so much); etc.
There are restrictions on DVD's... take it from someone who's tried to watch an American DVD on a European DVD player and vice versa. They are pretty easy to unlock though
Even so, if that's the problem, they should solve it with technology. If they let a customer gift games across pricing zones and the trading rules in the EULA don't inform you that this is unacceptable, then it's absurd to ban customers for doing it.
If they were in the same zone I can see no possible business reason why Valve would object to it, once they found that it wasn't fraud.
HOWEVER, legally it gets into the grey zone of money laundering, though it is laughable at such tiny amounts! :)
If the person was gifting games across pricing zones (can you do that?) in return for cash it gets very complicated and I can see Valve objecting to this as a way of getting around, say euro and dollar pricing.