Topic: Recent Events At Bitcoin Market - page 4. (Read 26159 times)

Could we get the email-addresses of the scammers? The ones they logged in with, not their paypal adresses. I just thought that if they are actually using stolen paypal accounts, it wouldn't seem likely to get any contact through that address. If the addresses connected to BCM are the real ones, they will be quite nice to have. Also, any chance that BCM has an unsafe password system  . It would be incredibly cool if it was possible to get the passwords of the scammers and they used the same passwords for email or other stuff!

What were the scammers doing exactly? I had quite a few buyers cancel trades and not pay but that was all. Im in Australia so really hope you do re-implement Paypal as its by far and away the easiest method of buying and selling bitcoins from here.

I am into sharetrading aswell and the broking firms here would only let you place a buy order for shares if you had at least an equivalent value of shares or cash in your account as collateral, which I think should be the case for bitcoin market too. If someone places a buy order and doesnt pay within 48 hours then Dustin can sell btc from the buyers account at the prevailing market rate in order to pay the seller.

Well it was bound to happen. With the combination of people recently finding out about bitcoin and BCM having open registration it really attracted a whole slew of scamers. I've made a good amount of trades on BCM with paypal and have never had a problem but the weekend just didn't feel right. The price was to high and there were to many active trades going on for the typical day on BCM. Though I did sell 15 BTC on the weekend and took a chance, I was lucky and was not scammed. I found it odd that the people I sold to were German and their paypal accounts were non U.S. accounts but they bought with USD. Also I was receiving emails in German from paypal. So this kinda sealed the deal for me to not sell any more seeing that BCM is mainly a U.S. site and having multiple sales that were not U.S. based one after another was odd.

It will be hard to fix the problem with paypal since it's to easy to commit fraud and charge back someone as well as a limited control over the transactions. It's to bad some people have to wreck it for everyone else. In a perfect world with out ass holes and idiots paypal would be a breeze but as we all know that's not the case and never will be. The only reason I used BCM with paypal is because I'm from Canada and it made it easy, but I think for now I'll stick with interac transfers.

Dwdollar do you have an ETA at all?

Lucky I have only purchased bitcoins so far!

BCM with paypal is the only place I can sell bitcoins without getting charged $50 to withdraw! (I'm in Australia)

Im lucky I can pay with AUD through Mtgox with local bank account...plus AUD is killing USD, I just hope USD comes back when I withdraw

All the best
Michael 

5810 attempted to scam me, but I reported the incident as soon as it was evident that I was dealing with a scammer versus a newbie trader.  To dwdollar's credit, I felt it was handled well.  

I am new to Bitcoin Market, but have made quite a few trades already. I have run into one person who sent me PayPal eCheck. eCheck can take a week or more to clear. I requested the buyer to send me instant payment instead or otherwise I will cancel the transaction. I gave him two reasons for this:

1. Buyer could buy bitcoins with an eCheck and watch for the value of bitcoins to rise. If the bitcoins fall in price, the buyer would cancel the transaction. If the bitcoins rise in price, buyer would continue with transaction. So the seller is taking buyer's risk for a period of a week or more.

2. Funds are not available right away to the seller of bitcoins, so the seller cannot trade on the market for a week. In this case, if the seller would like to reinvest the money back into bitcoins, it is not possible to do. In a week, the price of bitcoins could rise dramatically and the seller would be at a big disadvantage.


Dustin Dollar has not replied to my email to cancel the trade yet. I can understand that he might have a huge volume of emails to deal with right now.


The trade id in question is 1606 (https://bitcoinmarket.com/member/trades/view/?tradeID=1606). The trade occurred on 2011-06-01 20:41:38, but at this time I still have not received confirmation of the funds, it is still pending.

I would like to get some opinions if I am being unreasonable or unfair here for requesting to cancel this transaction. Member edmehlschau (4190) is a new member and does not have any ratings, so he could potentially take the PayPal money back and run if Dustin decides to rule in his favor for some reason.

Thanks,
dabest1

Update: To clarify, the transaction is still unconfirmed by me and bitcoins are sitting in the escrow on Bitcoin Market.

Well, I won't be requesting mine to be reversed!! 

I guess there are crooks everywhere.

I feel sorry for those that got burned. And those that can't get in due to a few bad players. 

The reversals aren't happening by accident. They occur when someone says their account was stolen (perhaps even rightly so). Paypal then sides with the buyer and returns their funds because on paypal the buyer always wins.

you mean i have 60 days to reverse my PP purchases? Freaking sweet! I'm just kidding.

I'm glad i was a purchaser and not a seller. If PP did wind up reversing my transactions, I'd find a way to pay the seller but i guess that's just me newbie 5233 at BitcoinMarket.

I'd love to be able to use PayPal and have my ebay and paypal id available for potential sellers to review prior to accepting my offer to buy. As I've been on ebay since 2001.

I'm just glad i got in before just before the paypal issues and prior to going back to invite only, otherwise I'd be on the outside looking in.

PayPal was a good option especially considering the velocity that it was driving the market, it did have a lot of new people looking at picking up some bitcoins. Alas, it also attracted some less than desirable characters too.

http://thebitcoinsun.com/post/2011/06/05/The-Paypal-Problem 

I'm in a similar situation where my entire 'banking' profile is online and Paypal represents about the only way I can 'cash out' to live in the real world given my location.  I'm by no means a fan of Paypal, I have nothing but contempt for them and their support structures and fees, but it serves a convenient purpose in my case.

I was lucky to not be defrauded (yet - PP has 60 days to get nasty), and kept most trades small as a safeguard.   Paypal commenced somewhat clandestine investigations on several of my transactions and cancelled them very quickly to 'protect me' before I released the coins, the rest where legitimate.  I was actually quite stunned at how much money people are willing to hand over with absolutely no safeguards, and just an anonymous me and a Confirm button standing between them.  The suggestions here can hopefully make the process safer for both parties with a clean recovery strategy in the case of either side failing.

Regardless, I greatly appreciate the efforts thus far and agree Paypal is most definitely not on the critical path for bitcoin success - Paypal just helps take it to a wider audience off the beaten track of the major established finance sectors, and helps me liberate my bitcoins too

We all know, PAYPAL is NOT the best choice.

But, think about this. The liberties that PAYPAL gives to scammers are the same liberties that we use. I have NO WAY to receive local currency from bitcoins, and Im wondering what would happen if I use a bank account on my country (hypothetically) to make bitcoin trades?. Probably the state will say "Hey, why are you moving that amounts of money without declaring them?. Soon or later I'll loose those liberties that PAYPAL gives me.

So let me help with some Ideas> We have two sides here>

Trading net> Variable
PAYPAL>NOT variable

So how we can make a risk free trading network?. Obviously we can't modify PAYPAL policies but we can modify ours.

More validation and rating systems must be implemented.

If you are not a "Great user" you cannot make trades for more than U$D100 in 24hs. Your bitcoins will be confirmed after x days, so you can't claim a refund.
What about unconfirmed transactions?. The user who already made the transaction simply can send a pic to the admin with the transaction ID and data. If the data is veracious then the trade will be auto-confirmed.

And, a trust network must be developed, awarding correct users by lowering the fees rates will be a nice idea to, more trustable users, less problems, less work. >)

Update for Ian> Happened to me once, I just sent an email to the user saying that he must not include anything about currency trading in the description. He apologized.
I think is more about informing the people. Even dwdollar was not aware of this. After the event that I've described, I sent an email to him with a recommendation to add an advice in the webpage so people will not commit the same mistake. He answered "I don't know of PayPal hassling end users?  Usually they just lock business accounts that have central accounts.".

We are in BETA stage, this mistakes are acceptable, we're all taking the risk in this new flourishing system.

I know that there are a lot of users that are in the same situation that me on this PAYPAL matter.

To dwdollar> Don't think that PAYPAL will do anything for us. We are violating their TOS. They will do all on their power to clean their hands. We have the hands tied...

Update: My account has been permanently limited for currency exchange. This is probably less because of b4rrydoyle and his scamming, and more because of the f@$king idiots who sent me payments with memos explicitly saying they were buying bitcoins.

About the same story for me too, #5810 took me for $541 across 2 transactions.  The first dispute looks like it was actually generated by the "buyer" and the second seems to be automatically generated.  The user-generated one looks to be closed (after I uploaded screenshots it was closed after about 2 minutes).  The second is *still* open.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but people were talking about opening and resolving a dispute so that it couldn't be disputed again?  I don't know if that works for PayPal, but otherwise intermediate escrow assuming the liability is the only "best for the seller" option that I can see.

My .02btc

Basically I sold a small amount of BTC for PPUSD on BM. I got the payment in my PP account and confirmed the trade on BM. About 8 hours later Paypal removed the funds and marked them as "held" because the sender filed a "regarding unauthorized access to his PayPal account" claim. The next day PP resolved the issue without my input on the matter. I feel this was the result of 1) A hacked PP account was used to send the funds 2) PP basically told me to go to hell because it was a BTC transaction.

Throughout all of this dwdollar was very reachable and replied to all my queries. I do not hold him or his service responsible for my loss of BTC. My loss is easily made up in a few days of mining.

I have sent email to the two addresses involved with this trade but have not gotten a response and probably will never get one.

It really is ashame when good people try to build a reputation by providing a very usable service and some greedy bastards have to come along and shit all over it.

Well life goes on. Small lesson learned.

Cheers.

I like the ease of use of PayPal as well, and I was lucky not to be scammed during this past weekend's run up since I was doing a large number of considerably sized transactions (30+ BTC).

You have some good suggestions and these may help somewhat mitigate the PP dilemma as well:

- Holding the BTC in escrow for a fixed period of time for new users
- An overhaul to the rating system to take into consideration successful large exchanges

If not, I'll be looking forward to the Dwolla support.

Hi.

I've been scammed to by a French guy, lucky me that I had withdraw all my money before the scammer claim it, so I'm in red now haha.


+1

The only reason that I use PAYPAL is because theres no other way in my country. In most South America countries PAYPAL is used for Ebay buying, and credit cards are not very abundant. People sometime have fear to link their CC to PAYPAL, so they buy credit to a trader. Thats how I get the money in my local currency. I can make that trade because PAYPAL is POPULAR, Ebay is POPULAR, and the demand of PAYPAL credit is hight.

I'm sure that we can think a way to make scamming harder to be accomplish.

I dug through the paypal tos and other documentation when I started trading at bitcoinmarket.com wanting to know just what my liability would be for funds i received via paypal.  Closest thing I found is that neither the buyer protection or seller protection apply to non-tangible goods.  I confirmed this an hour ago with a lengthy conversation with a paypal 'dispute specialist' on the phone.  He confirmed that unless there is a physical item actually shipped to an address, there is no protection for either party.

*Furthermore* he confirmed that if the sending party claims that the transaction was not authorized (as opposed to goods not received, etc), that is an immediate trigger to close the case and resolve automatically in favor of the sender, reversing the transaction.  I specifically asked if there was any avenue for appeal, arbitration, or anything else after that happened and the answer was "no, once a case is decided that is completely final".

I asked him what I as a seller could do to protect myself from liability from actual unauthorized transactions or dishonest buyers and the only suggestion he had was to deal only with verified paypal members.

Paypal is so "easy" that I really wish it was a viable option.  No matter which party they choose to protect by default there will always be people who abuse it.

My personal suggestion for how to proceed, if at all, with paypal in bitcoin trading circles is some combination of:

-feedback on traders, to establish reliability (and make it obvious, not something you have to dig to see)
-new members start with a low limit on trade size
-some currency balance be held as 'collateral' for trades of considerable value to discourage theft.
-some way for both parties to the transaction to decline to proceed if the other has questionable reputation