Is it even possible to get real money for CS:GO skins?

With the recent reports of the CS:GO shenanigans summarized in this video by h3h3, one has to wonder how did we even get to this point?

I mean as far as I understand if you sell a skin or any other items on steam, the money goes to your steam wallet and you can only use it to buy games. I highly doubt anyone would bother to create a scam of such caliber so he could buy all the DLC for Train Simulator.

So there's got to be an easy way to translate steam money for real money but as someone who is not familiar with trading and CS:GO skins I don't understand how they do it.

Most of the skins you'd ever own are very worthless. Every now and then someone somewhere gets a skin that actually is worth something more than $5. Even more rarely, they'd get a skin that's worth more than $400. The difference here is $400 is the upper limit for which you can sell items on the Steam market, so you wouldn't sell your skin there. Another drawback is you can't exchange Steam money for real money yourself.

Now we have items like Dragon Lore which cost MUCH more and you can't buy them through the market - enter 3rd party sites. People sell and buy skins through third party sites designed for this purpose - much like eBay. You can sell your Dragon Lore for something like 35 AWP Asimovs, at which point if someone agrees, you'd meet on Steam, and begin trading. You'd offer the Dragon Lore, they'd give you 35 Asimovs, hopefully no one gets scammed.

But of curse you don't want 35 Asimovs, you want some $$$

Another option is - you agree to exchange skins for money. He offers you $1000 for the AWP. If it's a friend of yours, you'd most likely agree to send him over the skin, and go collect the money in person. But since the internet is such a lovely place, a much more common practice is for you to receive Case Keys for the amount of money you're supposed to receive. They you'd go on another site and sell your keys for money you'd receive via Paypal or whatever. The trick here is, the key site would make small profit for making this exchange possible. So you started off with a DL worth $1000 and you end up with $980 after selling your keys.

Trust is very important, and people would go over each others Steam accounts to comment, much like eBay, you wouldn't want to trade with someone untrustworthy who'd try to scam you.

Trading via the marketplace in Steam will put the money in your steam wallet. However, all money that circulates in Steam was introduced somehow, mainly by people "topping up" their Steam wallet from their creditcard or bank account.

However, no-one forces you to sell skins via the marketplace. One can simply conduct regular trades between two accounts, and transfer the money separately. This usually happens with a trusted third party, who will hold onto the items until it has been confirmed that the funds have been transferred.

Note: I do not recommend using such services. It is easy to get scammed for either your Steam inventory or your real life money, and no real way to proof that it has happened.