Topic: How can we protect Newbies from getting scammed? - page 4. (Read 1538 times)

Hi, ac2eugenio,

Don’t get people wrong here. We welcome newbies with open arms. As much as possible we like to help them, protect newbies, know what they want, the reasons why they want to participate on Bitcointalk. Who knows that newbie could be the next theymos. We all started as newbies here, I too have bad experienced here; got rejected, no replies from PM while asking curious questions when I was a newbie.

The thing we hate are newbies who came here to spam, do plagiarism, engage on any rule breaking/scam group of people, and other stuff that could lead to next generation of newbies a bad image of our forum. Example was a newbie saying “thank you for this topic, very helpful to me and other people” – It was deleted by moderator. Then, replied again “I have a perfect grammar and on topic message, why it was deleted? This forum is a joke.” – saying Thank you and some blah blah blah are perfect grammar now? As FH said: The forum is not an "exam", we are not here to hear the same answers again and again but in your own words.  Make us laugh (or mad!), add something of value, something new or something interesting to the discussion.
Even me who have now 41k+ good reports got 15 replies deleted and 3 topics removed.

Newbies engaging on scams or manipulations are surely bad reflections for new gens. They may think that it is a good practice to engaged on such activities, because it wasn’t red tag by the early DT members. Tagging is the way we can help other genuine newbies in choosing the right persons to communicate with. But, we can’t please everyone, people listen in different stories and they are the one who decides what stories they want to accept as true.

Again, we welcome newbies here. This forum will be passed down to the new batch of newbies, we can’t be here forever. If people think we’re against them, then you’re not part of bitcointalk. 

See you around.

theyoungmillionaire

A welcome PM from forum to all newbie could go a long way to warn them about scammers on forum. When a new user creates an account and login a PM should be sent welcoming them to the forum and warning him/her e.g "Welcome to the forum (username). Don't believe any offer or click on any links sent to you through PM's, all transactions should be carried out openly on threads to prevent possible scam attempt". in addition to any other important information the forum want to info the users about.


If purchase accounts get scammed I don't think it's the forum problem they deserve it because you can find warning all over the forum discouraging account farming. And those users involved in account farmingare looking for short cuts to earning therefore deserve whatever they gets be it red tagged, scammed or ban.

Surely it isn't just the newbie account that include scammers. In fact, it's probably more likely that purchased senior accounts will be scammers.

I can understand the feeling of that guy who lost his/ her huge money.
However, I think that the forum always have so many available helpful topics:
Most of them can be found there:
[GUIDES] on Bitcointalk. Index thread (until there is a dedicated subforum?) (LoyceV's topic).
From essential knowledge, skills, and guide to investigate scam projects.
So, I think that the forum has actually made good help for newbies, not only newbies in the forum, but also newbies in crypto.
Or this warning message, but naive and lazy guys don't care of it.

It is too technical complicated for me, but sounds good idea.
However, those naive and lazy guys often don't care to use Escrow. They simply want to get fastly supports/ guides.

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I don't agree to the ideas of disabling PMs in the forum, because it is one of the most helpful and essential features for forum users, no matter what who they are.
The forum actually has restrictions on Newbies' ability to use PMs.

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Key lesson:
Be safe first, before thinking of anything.
Think, re-think, do it repeatedly till you think it's safe to do.
Always be extremely cautious with help for strangers.

I just try to be helpful for new and other users as long they dont get on me personally and want to know real things !

Most important thing on the Forum "  Dont Click any Links you dont Know or have done some research about "

It's very sad for me that someone got scammed from forum. To be honest we can't stop this kind of stupid from get scam. I can't believe that whoever hold 7+ btc on his Electeum wallet he don't know about warning that he should not input any code that he have no knowledge about that. Also we don't know really who is scammer. As a DT we tag when someone got scam or if we doubts or suspect any scammy activity. I don't think even forum admin could help this kind of stupid. What will do with IP address if scammer use VPN or Tor browser? Scammer isn't really smart from us? So many warning post but no one bother to read, so how can we help them? If you stop PM then they will contact by mail or telegram.

Actually we can't stop them if they are not careful with their fund.

I can't see victim made any help post. Even he had not botherd to search forum even there is Electrum board. After got scam he have made thread and we can't do anything without tag scammer.

Unfortunately it cannot be stopped until the newbies even don't have basic level skill and knowledge about crypto currencies and common sense about what they were doing.

What we can do most for them is giving a warning message at the section like marketplace such "Only trade with the person if you know him or have better reputation or always use escrows"

I do not see good points in newbie users being able to use PM. There is a lot of risks they take when receiving a PM. And most newbies use it to spread spam, scam and stuff like that.

In addition, any bug-related issues about wallets problems should be addressed in public posts. There is no real gain for this conversation to be private. Since the solution to the problem can help several other users later.

But the problem in question can potentially harm several other people. It's not a simple scam, and for those who do not understand how Bitcoin and transactions work, it can easily fall into something like that. It would be important for more people to know about this possibility. Especially in the novice section. It would be important for more people to know about this possibility. Mainly in the Beginners & Help section.

Possibly newbies should be disabled from receiving messages from users less than a Member rank. This should probably help them a little since the trust is too displayed in the PMs which might warn them about the user. If the scammer posts his mail ID in the topic, then the problem shouldn't be under the control of forum anymore. I do accept this forum acts as an entity or middleman for newbies getting scammed more often, but it lies with the user to verify before what actions they perform. Since I visit Tech Board quite often, when I try to help out a newbie and if the problem doesn't get solved, they message me for assistance. Isn't messaging me is quite irrelevant and if I was a scammer I could have scammed them easily in a go.  Newbies can easily fall for the scams provided if they initiate the discussion and doesn't know what is going on around them.

This is a decentralized forum, depending on quite few trusted individuals for a technical help isn't good. Anyone can help, provided the poster should be aware of his doings.

That's how people learn, you get scammed and you learn your lesson, some leave, some learn.

Unfortunately it's a never ending cycle, as newbies will keep coming in. That's how scammers are thriving.

The best lesson is getting scammed and hopefully for a minimal amount. I have had my share in my first days on the forum. Being called greedy afterwards by older members didn't exactly help my case. Being called naive was appropriate though. I reached crypto adulthood very rapidly since. Didn't happen again...

Why are you suddenly concern about the newbies? low rank unworthy people as i recall you dont trust low rank members here so why? your gang loves to tag low rank members why do you want to protect them? its contradicting .Well for me ,let them ignorance wont save your ass from anything here high rank do scams,extortions and other shit stuffs going on here if you arent awre then leave this place.Dont trust anyone,thats the golden rule.

Honestly, I think that someone that naïve can't be protected. Even if every inch of the page had been full of warnings, he still might've fallen for it, since he wasn't even thinking about the possibility of being given evil instructions. The scammer was a Jr Member, not some Legendary.

People like him (ie. the majority of the world population) are why we'll someday want an optional sidechain or something on top of Bitcoin which has reversible transactions (via some sort of automatic 2-of-3 escrow which expires after a while, maybe).

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He should have the police contact me and I'll give them the scammer's IP logs.

Newbies (and other members) should know that if something is too good to be true, it is usually not true...
Also, there should be something that reminds newbies that bitcoin is really similar to the internet (because if someone starts to deal with bitcoin, he/she has some minimal knowledge about the internet otherwise he/she couldn't get in touch with bitcoin) so bitcoin is really similar to the internet, if you don't hand over your password of your email address to a stranger, you should not hand over any password, private key, etc... to strangers, doesn't matter how nicely the stranger asks...

but this is not the responsibility of the forum and the members.
Sure there can be support and help but the initialization of a legal process need to done the scammed person.

I wish there was something we could do to prevent these types of things from happening, but unfortunately I think it's impossible.  More and more folks who are not tech savvy will be entering into the crypto world, and that means more people will be there in attempt to take advantage of them.  I learned a few lessons early on, and luckily for me they were relatively affordable lessons.  

Good catch finding this scammer's information, kudos for that.  Hopefully he gets caught, and the victim gets his money back.

I’d rather suggest that newbies with wallet problem and sort of will be directly pointed to DT members or a well known technical supports in this forum first for a solution before posting it publicly. Like A list of trusted people that is posted and pinned on sections that is relevant to they’re issues.

Example:

Pinned:
   Trusted Member/Names
   LoyceV -Profile Link -other contact SM links

Location: Services

But IF (no solutions from DT) then a third party members will be called by the DT themselves. (They’re reputation will be on stake at this process).

If problem solve (a tip is welcome ).

Something technical like this we could create a shortcut of questions like a FAQ. So they select Start new thread and they are asked whether their questions fits into certain criteria in this example given its about wallets so if they enter wallet in the post then an automatic system could pick that as a keyword and ask whether their question is about wallet. They select yes and then will be taken to a another set of questions to narrow down their question. The tree would look something like Start new thread > Is your question about a wallet? > Please select your wallet A. Electrum B. Bitcoin core C. Other. > Have you lost password?> Is your wallet having problems with syncing? Basically it runs through the most common problems and at the end either links to a already informative thread or provides a link to trustworthy people who have opted in to help these sort of questions.

It will be nice if upon registering it will pop up or something, at least they are already warned.
Also, safety precaution is another warning when PMing someone like what we have already on our forum.

Existing
Message received by veterans:
!!!WARNING: This user is a newbie. If you are expecting a message from a more veteran member, then this is an imposter!!!

New feature
Newbie sending a message:
!!!WARNING: You are about to message a veteran member. Beware of scammers: If you are expecting a message from/to a more veteran member, then this is an imposter!!! Do not blindly believe anyone, not all persons are genuine helper.

It could be done if we could track down the scammer, and initiate a legal process.