What safety guarantees can you offers sellers? I'm asking because there were stories on the Localbitcoins forum earlier this year about a group of persons inviting to trade at cafes in London and during the trade a Mickey Mouse incident ensued. One of the stories quoted from Localbitcoins:
....
More stories on the Localbitcoins forum collectively backing up these incidents. I'm not saying you intend to do this but in light of this trend of assault-and-steal pattern of crimes, what guarantees can you provide assuring this will not happen? I notice you have a 3-week old LBC account, all the more reason to invite some form of guarantee or at least explain here how the transaction will take place.
Why not use an escrow provider here?
....
More stories on the Localbitcoins forum collectively backing up these incidents. I'm not saying you intend to do this but in light of this trend of assault-and-steal pattern of crimes, what guarantees can you provide assuring this will not happen? I notice you have a 3-week old LBC account, all the more reason to invite some form of guarantee or at least explain here how the transaction will take place.
Why not use an escrow provider here?
Your considerations are absolutely reasonable and we're also have same risks from our side.
Using any escrow service with acceptable reputation is possible and we are ok with it.
The only nuance is the commission of the escrow. During the special offer period, with 0% commission from our side we'll have to put this expenses on the customer side.
As you already mentioned our Localbitcoins account, you may check it has some transactions and positive feedback from traders with relatively big volumes. Of course you can argue it might be not real, etc. Only time will judge, because no-one can avoid account ban or negative responses if it's used for scamming people. And account already has some time behind itself.
We have an office on Brook Street we can meet there if the amount is somewhat big, in other cases we appoint a public places.
To earn trust we are acting like this during first meeting:
- we meet in a public place in central London, we have a list of preferable places, but can meet anywhere you'd like if it's secure enough
- we do a brief acquaintance and confirm initiation of the deal
- we give you an approximate amount of cash you'll receive after exchange order on the market will settle BEFORE you send anything to our wallet.
- after the first confirmation, we sell exactly the same amount you sent, using our own funds on the market to speed up the deal. As soon as order is executed we fix the rate and do final mutual settlements
Basically there is two ways:
1. Use some escrow service
2. If you have no history with the peer and no references for him you have to decide yourself if it's secure and trustworthy enough to deal peer-to-peer.
If you have some ideas besides using escrow and above stated schema, we'd love to hear it.
If this is the way you want to trade, then only God can help people who would be willing to trade with you.
