Topic: This forum is infested with scammers - page 2. (Read 3878 times)

OTC is kind of useless, look with what I've been living with from the times of bitcoinica...

http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=paraipan

Never traded with them but still got the neg votes. Can't even talk on bitcoin-otc for this reason :/

Bitcoindrama is already registered - perhaps we should send it there.  BTCJam should probably be renamed BTCesspit, though.

Hehe, should it be severed off and be put on bitcoinsesspit.org ?

Just put in the inbox of everyone that has less than 200 posts a big large sign with red letters that says: "Assume that everybody that wants to trade with you is a scammer wanting to steal your money, and be very careful. If in doubt, post in the forum and have the opinion of more experienced users."

But again - not sure to what extent we should protect newcomers ?

Pirate had a large mouth, so did a lot of other scammers. They brag, boast, and flap their feather wings, because of their big egos. This is a very large big red sign. Everybody should learn that. Not saying that the attention-seeking loud talkers are all scammers, but it seems like they very frequently is. At the same time, a lot of people get duped by all that hoopla. I hope it serves as an education for those who got fooled, and that they're more careful in the future.

The bitcoin-otc system is not foolproof, and I would not trust it blindly, I would do my own investigations before dealing with somebody, and I have turned down trades with users that have good ratings, simply because they could not provide some reasonable amount of information that I was asking for. I don't care whether they think I was just too paranoid, or whether they were scammers and were afraid of getting caught with their pants down. Either way, the end result was that I wasn't scammed.

No matter how much of a great trust rating Pirate had, I would've never done any deals with him, because I do not trust people that are jumping up and down, and handwaiving with excitement constantly.

Flamboyant egomaniacs are to be avoided at all costs.

I'm not entirely against that idea, but the point of arbitration in the real world is that it's legally binding.  A lot of scams here are for relatively trivial amounts and arbitration seems like an absurd amount of effort for the mere awarding of a tag (which most scammers don't care about anyway).  It seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity and expense for transactions which aren't high value.

I'm also somewhat against this forum being the policeman for the entire Bitcoin economy.  We've recently seen a thread in the scam forum regarding a BTCJam transaction and I'm not sure that this forum should consider awarding tags on the basis of activity which hasn't taken place here.

If the scammer tag process is too laborious, it's not much use - it warns people after the horse has well and truly bolted.  But I also think a trend is developing where people make little effort to actually resolve issues before posting scammer accusation threads and expect to have the tag apllied on the basis of little or no evidence.

If we're going to make any changes to the way we deal with scammers in this forum, I think we need to review the whole thing and decide whether the forum should play any active role in policing scammers and to what extent. 

It's been suggested before, and maybe it's time to revisit the idea of splitting Marketplace off from the forums proper.

If they are posting garbage though you will know they will be a high risk of being a scammer.

I don't want to use any post count limits because they'll incentivize people to post garbage.

That or make it so that you need to hit a post count (200 should be good) or donate an amount of bitcoins before you are even aloud to post in lending never mind make a thread but it would have to be a high amount to put of scammers.

That's what I was thinking, though they could also escrow.


"We" wouldn't need to. The traders themselves would decide who to trust.

So sort of... obligatory escrow? Or would the arbitrator only decide about the scammer tag? It would be interesting if the trusted arbitrator also escrowed the deals, I'm sure a hell of a lot less people would get scammed/ With so many deals going on on the forum how many arbitrators would there need to be? What compensation would they get? How would they be chosen?
I think the idead is interesting but worth discussing first.

Biggest problem I foresee I... trust.
We had quite a few legitimately reputable members turn scammers, how could we trust arbitrators?

I was one of the persons who gave Pirate a +10 rating, along with a sarcastic comment, after the scheme collapsed. Just to show how useless the system was. Because the ratings were the main reason I trusted in him... ...the ratings and how everybody around here touted the BTC-otc ratings as something to be taken into account when dealing with other users.

Another good solution would be to force everyone to agree on an arbitrator with their trading partner before trading. Then whenever someone claims that they were scammed, the arbitrator would decide who gets a scammer tag. I'm not sure if I could easily force everyone to do this, though, since transactions are almost always finalized via PMs.

I already foresee too many problems with that, special interests could easily get people in who could tip the decision making process in their favour, I think when this place stops being a simple community where people gather and starts pandering to certain groups as I've seen happen many times in the past I'm out of here. I'm not pointing out you individually but too many times people like you come up with these 'great' ideas that the admins and mods get harassed with until they comply, when it's finally put into action everyone leaves out of disgust and the community is empty.

A discussion board and a community should be just that, turn it into anything else to attract people who don't exist and you'll just end up in an oasis of topics that date back to several years ago

People constantly try to warn others in threads where likely scams are happening and get told to "stop trolling".

The scammer forum is pretty much for after the fact warnings and having glanced at the crap it's filled with now, it's become pretty much useless.

Introducing a post/time threshold for certain types of posts would increase the effort required to start trolling for victims.  I'm hesitant to use SomethingAwful as a reference point, but the requirement that you must be a member for 7  months before you can sell something on their SAMart forum helps make scammers look elsewhere for easy pickings. 

You're not going to stop scammers looking for victims.  You can only exert some measure of control over how easy it is for them to find them here.

Agreed. Perhaps it's also good for people to get scammed, so they learn.

Indeed. His score was great when everything started and I'm sure his #otc ratings were a reason for people to trust him. In the end it has turned out to be pretty useless though. I mean, someone still gave him a rating of +10 in November; long after BST was dead and the cat out of the bag.
Given a number of sockpuppets any rating system can be abused to create false ratings. Not only can a scammer upvote himself, but also downvote others. Still, scammer tags do serve a purpose, especially for those with high post numbers. A newbie can be honest, but most would consider someone with an old account and lots of posts to be better.
A tag makes that account worthless. Just look at paybtc: he's ignoring everything, acts like nothing ever happened and doesn't even attempt to be helpful. He even changed his name a few times; I assume to get rid of the negative aura his old name has. Yet, he has no tag.

More specifically, only trade with bonded sellers.

If you've ever dealt with contractors or tradesmen this comes up from time to time. If the person you're buying from is bonded it means that a sum of money has been set aside somewhere to pay out damages in the event of a dispute.

Now with bitcoin, you don't need to rely on the word of any specific company - the bond can be a matter of public record.

In the immortal words of Ron White: you can't fix stupid. You're absolutely right: some people are just going to make terrible decisions like that, and we can't help them.

But we can make it more difficult for that scammer to claim another victim, and we can make it so members have less excuses when falling for obvious scams. I think both of these things can be done without a heavy burden on the community.

I think the simplest idea (which is also in my topic) would be putting a post requirement to access the lending subforum, which is where most of our scams originate. Putting a 150 post count requirement would increase the amount of time needed for a scammer to place his trap in that section. It would also give both scammers and legitimate members a larger pool of posts for potentials lenders to review before committing to a deal. If the scammer simply fills up his count with off-topic or short, pointless messages, a smart lender will think twice before parting with his money. Members who give their money away without doing their own research will have less of an excuse when they cry foul: 13 posts are hard to judge, but 150 will give you a good idea. Since the restriction would only affect that subforum, it would place no burden on newly registered members.

Hand-in-hand with that idea, or alternatively to it, would be placing a time restriction on the lending forum: accounts that are not older than, say, three months are not allowed to post there.

Both of those ideas would increase the time it would take a scammer to place a topic and get a victim. If he has to go through that wait for every account he creates, the "reward" he gets may not be worth the time he could have spent elsewhere. The scammer could always increase his target amount, but high-dollar scams are less likely to claim victims (especially if, with the posting requirement, the scammer has mostly useless posts).

Like you said: that scam is easy money. Quick changes like those can make it hard money. Scammers usually don't want hard money.

My topic also mentions possible changes to the newbie requirements that could help, but the balance would need to be in making reasonable restrictions that help prevent scams without burdening the community.

EDIT: Another good thing, I think, about these changes is how simple it would be to implement them. I've never been the admin of a forum, but I would think it'd be something like changing a setting on the forum control panel. It would, at the least, result in less work for theymos and the mods to take care of.

Trust no one. If you do then live with the consequence.