Topic: Even in escrow can get scammed :| (Read 250 times)

I did not mean it to be escrow, but do not buy gift cards from individuals unless they are reliable, and gift cards escrow does not mean anything here. On P2P exchange, you are looking for the member’s feedback and whether he is reliable, but after starting to deal with him, you will find that escrow always believe the seller in most cases. Therefore, even if you use a reliable escrow in buying gift cards, you may be scammed, the only difference is that trusted members avoid scamming you because they are running a profitable business.

Here the platform is not issue its about the mode of payment since the nature of gift card is unable to validate until it gets redeem so if OP wants to continue the trades then he needs to choose multiple modes of payments I mean accepting or selling so he can get his customers first which will built his trust also he can find who is trusted enough to trade in future even with modes that is possible to chargeback.

To mitigate the risks of scammers in bitcointalk then the user needs to choose certain criteria for who is going to trade with like

- Never deal with throwaway accounts unless they are willing to escrow (only irreversible payments)
- Don't communicate outside the platform to avoid impersonators.
- Trade with established members of higher trust level to ensure they won't scam you.

The middleman or escrow has a big role to have successful transactions but we can't urge the escrow to decline the deal if it was a questionable transaction. Trust is very important in doing this and if both parties don't agree on the agreement then there is no reason to blame the middleman. Because for me, if I trusted the escrow I send him the funds right away.

But if I were you OP, I'd rather use reputable exchanges than hire someone to close the deal as it was too risky.

I think what he needs is a platform that is reliable and safe enough for him to do his deals, him saying my dear even here wont guarantee him that 100% trust his looking for, scammers are all over the internet and they wont stop till they have what they want and even at that, they WONT STOP.

Selling a gift card is always risky, I once sold my game voucher gift-card that I got as reward from stacking some crypto. I try to sell it because I don't need it, finally got someone who is interested in a facebook group, and I ask the group admin to be the middle-man. I am sure that I never use the code and I and the buyer are the only people knew the code. I ask the buyer to record his screen when he tried to redeem the the code, he did but the he said that the gift-card has been redeemed, then I checked and it is true that the code has been redeemed. I don't have any proof but I am pretty sure that he is the one who redeemed the code. So, I never got the money and I lost my gift-card not that much just $150 but still, I could order enough pizza for one 5 days with that money.

Seeing how the seller's performance is, of course, you can be sure that he is trusted or not. If there are no recommendations or the seller is just a new person trying to become an escrow, is it mandatory to trust. Because many are stuck with fake escrows because they see the costs are quite low compared to others. Don't be tempted by low fees and maybe give some bonuses, because that could be an indication of a scam.

What are you trying to buy?
Not only you can get scammed, but you may buy a hacked, stolen or illegal voucher, and then you will bear the legal responsibility, no matter how tempting the offer is, but the mucus is greater.
If I were you, I would prefer vouchers that you can buy from the store, I can buy it physically, take a picture of the voucher or the gift card and then it will be fine, but the guarantee does not work well in such cases, the seller must be reliable, otherwise do not try to buy.

I think you are new to your work because you must have some experience with the escrow platforms like how they work, I read some replies from members and many had already said how Escrow platform could be used. But from your scenario I think you are new to this kind of work. Because you could make a agreement with the buyer you are going to sell voucher that, there will be no refund after the trade occurs. And once you made an escrow using any platform you will automatically receive the funds.

And I prefer you to not trust anyone here until you met someone in person because BTT is full of newbies who are always eager to scam you so I don't want you to be getting scammed in such a small trade. You should get ideas from different Escrow platform like how could you solve your problem using them instead of relying on some BTT member. The risk will be more if you shift to trust on BTT members.

you can try following the suggestion from Tryninja or BitMaxz they seem to have good suggestions but as LoyceV has said, if it is possible to verify that the voucher is valid without invalidating it, I think that would be the best action to follow and let the escrow verify it's authenticity(as LoyceV has said)

If the escrow came out of nowhere then chances for you or to other people to get scam is so high. But if you hire a reputable escrow here then you can assure that the deal done will be successful. But also make sure you didn't make a deal using a huge amount since even if they are reputable and if they see a huge money at stake then maybe they might shift then decide to scam the deal which is entrusted to them.

I believe it is the fault of the escrow. He should released the fund as soon as he gave the voucher info to the buyer. I won't trust any escrow if something like this ever happened connected with his service.

It boils down to the quality of the escrow service. Make sure to use reputable and experienced/knowledgeable escrows.

Using escrow is a old and reliable methods of doing P2P transactions. In a online transaction there is no way to trust somebody if he is not well recognized or you personally know him. In case of voucher i think there is a way to charge back the money even after few days but if you send any kind of crypto assets its gone forever. There will not be any way to get it back so it is bit risky to do P2P trade for a voucher.

When it's related to gift card, you must trade with highly reputable and trusted seller. So you will be safe and save some money because you don't need to pay escrow service. Using escrow service when you trade something that easily could be reversible would just cause a drama.

Also you shouldn't trade big amount of money for gift card.

This is nothing than when you're being scammed, that's why so many people make use of a reliable escrow service providers and mostly from reliable exchanges to help them exchange their cards or funds into any currency they wanted, the thing is simple but the process is hard to be trusted except you're dealing with a reliable escrow provider


Don't trust people easily, being a bitcointalk member doesn't mean they can't cheat you, although we are having a number of those who are reliable in that aspect, but always make your research before making deals with anyone to avoid been scammed.

Yeah Bitcoin talk has a section that shows an individual trust score.
You can use escrows that have been vouched for in the forum
Or use a well licensed Escrow.
There are different method to check
if a business is licenced in a country online
Like in my country, we just have to search for the company name in the CAC official site.
Online businesses are accompanied by risks
But having a trustworthy escrow boost buyers and sellers confidence.

I mean an escrow is just a middleman for sure it is possible to get a scam even though you already have escrow, I mean I have a similar case when I do a transaction online on Facebook related to NFTs and cryptocurrency. If your selling something like a token for sure buyer is not going to trust you that easily, there where no way to fairly send both the sender and the receiver at the same time unless you have something like a platform or maybe something like a middleman.

The thing here is to pick an escrow that you already trusted or that is already well-known in the community If you're going to escrow here in the forum there are already a lot of trusted members here in the forum that is already trusted as an escrow probably already handle thousands of transactions here in the forum. if you do that it is almost guaranteed that you're not gonna get scammed. The thing scammer does is the scammer know the middleman and when you send your funds to the middleman both of them are going to disappear and scam your money, I mean it's easy just dont pick an escrow that you dont know or you dont trust.

From what I've seen, escrow here mostly gives a false sense of security. See Best practices for Bitcointalk escrow providers. All is fine as long as both parties are honest, but an escrow should assume that's not the case.

Is it possible for the escrow to verify authenticity of the vouchers without invalidating them?

I am not much of a person who uses escrow platforms but once there was a platform (do not recall the name exactly but it's something Z) the platform was new and they enables the review for members to do. But I can't join the review but still tried it. And that platform was good. On that idea. Once you send the vouchers the middle man (that platform) will hold them and on the other side the buyer will get the notification that you (the seller) have released the vouchers.

So, the platform will ask the buyer to release the funds and once the transaction from both sides will be done things will be handed over to both parties. (fund from seller to buyer and voucher from seller to buyer).

This means, when the transaction is done, you are good to go, now it's not your problem whether that voucher works or not because you must have shown them before the validity of the vouchers and you are legit from your side so you will not be investigated.

But this could also be used to scam people who would try to sell invalid vouchers too. Overall, my point is, there are many escrow projects which ar good. You are making mistakes and bearing losses just because you have some flaws in your rules which you have to change. Like at first, you should show them the validity and then no money back rules is good once the other party receive the assets.

Alternatively as already suggested above I think it would be better before you send the voucher ask the buyer that your voucher is not refundable unless he has video proof that the voucher does not work. And then ask the buyer to start recording a screen video before sending the voucher until redeeming.

It is much safer I guess than asking escrow to temporarily log in to buyer's account and redeem by itself.

Random thought, but maybe a very trusted escrow can login to the user’s account (with a temporary password) and activate the voucher himself?

Usually there is a risk anyways. What if I’m selling a GPU and the buyer claims I sent him a rock over the mail? At the end of the day you’ll have to record every step of the deal and the escrow has to decide on an outcome even if he can’t be absolutely sure of what happened.