Topic: Escrow Section / General Scam Prevention (Read 235 times)

Exactly.  The forum already allowed a member to scam over 2,000 BTC by "highlighting" his trustworthiness in holding 500 BTC for the forum (while he was being paid 5 BTC a month to scam the community).

And I believe this scammer is still on the list of escrows.   And trusted by the Administrator.   

I don't think human escrows will be needed in the near future.  

The amount of time for searching those reliable escrows will be lessen if there's a board created for it since it will placed the topic/service on the correct board.

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But I also think it's also good to add a Donation board since as of now I see so many threads created for charity projects so maybe this is the time to have a board for charity discussions since if we left it place on service section it will be buried and other important topics regarding on services will be left out.

A simple search or "Bitcointalk escrow service providers" on your preferred search engine will guide you to the correct page. Now you can bookmark it to your browser for a quick opening.

Also we have a sticky already here:
Prevention is better than a cure. Please escrow. like ChiBitCTy already said.

It is posted in the Marketplace subsections like Goods, where sales threads are mostly posted. Now in a perfect world people would read this and always use an escrow to trade, but thats not the case. If someone does not care about reading these threads and jumping into a trade then its their risk. You cannot make the horse drink the water, you know.

I do agree with both of your posts but the likelihood of this happening is slim to none at the moment...

• It's somehow similar to the outcome of other requests for various sections ^{[e.g. Signature campaigns, LN, accelerators and a few more]} and that's not having enough demand or threads for this kind of section/board to be created ^[yet].

Agreed, I think this would be very helpful.  I've spent several years here and mainly in Marketplace and when I was a noob I was very confused on who to trust and what was what.  I think a moderator pinning the trusted escrows thread to the top of each marketplace board like Squalls post in goods would be sufficient enough. ( Speaking of Squall, what an awesome member, too bad they seem to have moved on!)

While I do agree that escrows should be considered services, I feel like what they provide (which is security and scam protection) make it worthy of having its own section so that users can find an escrow of their choice much more easily. The search function on this site isn't the best, so when and escrow thread doesn't get bumped often, it just falls behind all of the other general services being offered on the forum. I agree that the sticky thread may come off incorrectly, and that is why I believe the best way for forum mods to stay removed from endorsing people as a forum would be to just make a community space where this info is easily found instead.

In terms of the complications, I think having the separate section would be helpful because people from across the globe can post there for their escrow services. Then mods don't have to keep track of current escrows and their time regions, but instead the posts can be made individually. I do know that there are cases when high trusted members turn out to have bad intentions, but I would argue that that case is much less frequent than the average transaction scam.

I'm not so sure that we need a specific board for escrow services, it fit into the services section well enough.  A sticky thread with a list of escrow providers might help, but I would be afraid that it could be mistaken as an endorsement by the forum.  If something goes wrong, such as an escrow provider turning scammer, or a dispute between the trading partners, the forum could theoretically be held culpable.  I don't know what laws would be applicable in such a situation, but I would hate to see the forum held liable for something in which it had no part other than a "sticky thread."

I've thought about ways to simplify and expand the escrow services for forum users, but I think to make it work right it's likely to get complicated.  If, for example we had a crew of trusted members that are recruited to participate in a community escrow project.  Perhaps they are nominated and voted into service by the community.  They could employ a multi sig wallet with 3 of 20 signatures required to release funds.  The more provider who are involved the faster the transactions could be completed.  Ideally the members would be from all corners of the globe, with multiple members from nearby time-zones.  Such a project would be hard to coordinate, and not likely to generate much, if any income.  The participants would have to consider it as volunteering their time for service to the community.

I've been on and off on these forums for the past few months, but I noticed that fairly recently an Invites and Accounts section was created along with a couple of pinned posts in the Marketplace section as well. However, there are still cases of random probable scam posts as well as people who refuse to use escrow. For example, here is an interaction in regards to a very suspiciously cheap Airpods Pro listing:


The thing is, I feel like if we want to bring new members into the marketplace section, escrow should be a comfortable, easy to learn about and use service. Currently, escrows are posted in the Services section, but that area is also filled with Signature Campaigns and other general services. Making an escrow section with a stickied post defining how to use escrows would be pretty beneficial in my opinion, as it eases a learning curve that buyers/sellers may have while offering simple scam protection on the forum.

Another step would be to have only trusted members be able to post in that area, meaning escrows would be of hopefully higher quality.

Any thoughts on this approach?