buyer a
seller b are the same person
buyer a sends coins with addy 12345
deal dies
buyer a says addy 12345 is not good asks for refund to addy 12346
seller never answers so you decide to refund to addy 12346
buyer a comes back says account was hacked you refunded to wrong addy
ogNasty has his I only refund to send addy rule it stops this scam.
But in the isoneguy case he did not have access to the send address and he can prove it is still him. they should have mediated with me.
I looked at it and see both points of view but losing a controlled btc addy can happen and if it does ogNasty's rule does not protect the escrow if he insists on burning the coins by sending to a dead account.
For instance your home and core wallet floods out no core the hdd store in a local bank was also flooded. refund is sent to a dead addy.
or I die (it will happen) wife proves I am dead and she does not have password to the core but has access to say coinbase.
Escrow sends to core money = dead wife sues escrow.
So if I the escrow act with the rule
send address must be refund address I am thinking of a few cases that I can be sued.
I am working on a modification to that rule.
that protects :
1)escrow
2)buyer
3)seller
Was the buyer really hacked? In any case, there is not really something that can be done except providing a further safety level like asking the buyer for a refund address before the deal start. Like Danny suggested. Or buyer and or seller provides a signature or a pgp key that can be used in case a refund has to happen.
Besides that... escrow would have to trust on the identity of the user. User has to make sure that his account is safe and not hacked. Escrow otherwise has to assume that he still deals with the same person.
With bigger amounts it might help to send a small amount first.
I had it happen that someone got hacked. Not sure if one of the users was the hacker or if it was a third party. Hacker had access to the sellers account and changed the receiving address. I asked back 2 times and always only received the answer that it is alright and the right address.
It turned out that the hacker, if it was so, deleted fast every incoming pm I sent to the seller and answered to me. Then deleted it from outbox also. Seller did not receive a notice about what went on. Probably didn't check email or hacker also deactivated email for new pm's. Not sure anymore.
In any case it is hard to protect against. At some level you have to trust that you still deal with the same person and the trader has to protect his account.
