Topic: This forum is infested with scammers - page 3. (Read 3878 times)

Interesting.  Only trade with bond sellers.

Merchants and traders who want to be bonded create a 2 of 3 multisig address with the other two parties being a bond company and an escrow company and publicly advertise this balance.

In the event of a dispute, the customer can take their case to the bond company and escrow company who then can release damages paid from the bond balance.

Merchants who want to build up a good reputation have to start small, and should be advised to invest some percentage of their gross into the bond so that customers will be willing to trust them with increasingly larger amounts. When they are ready to cash out they can have the funds released after a pre-negotiated waiting period so that existing customers have time to move their business before the bond protection runs out.

Smart customers will never risk more in a trade than the bond is worth, or else will negotiate for better terms for high risk transactions.

Could you elaborate? Alternative to ratings would be nice to hear about.


Sounds good in theory, but we've tried something similar before and a few people got excited about it but it ultimately never went anywhere. That's here Do you think people would be willing to do that for free on an extended basis? Wouldn't want people rotating in all the time, it would get hard to find really trusted people who want to do that sooner or later. Could always require a small fee for scammer tag consideration I suppose, but that seems a little beyond the scope of what the forum should be.

I'm still in favor of just replacing the system, I'll be interested in seeing what the users think though. 


Honestly we'd rather remove the newbie restrictions, rather than make them tighter just to solve a problem that can't be solved. No matter what we do to make an account hard to get to the lending section, they'll just do it a dozen accounts at a time. Just look at the guy I was responding to. He sent 500 dollars to someone with 13 posts and a month on his account. What kind of restrictions can we place that wouldn't burden normal users too badly, yet cause someone to not want to make that kind of easy money?

You make an excellent point in your entire post: nothing will completely stop scammers 100%. But I think that the amount of scammers can be cut down considerably, or at least a good amount in relation to the little effort it would take.

I believe the same thing you do: a lot of our scammers can/will/do simply create new accounts and try again. Changing the newbie restrictions a bit would take very little effort and would make the process of getting a scam out there more difficult. It won't stop scams, but I think it would help prevent them. Scammers would likely have to go for bigger scams to make the reward worth the effort, and bigger scams would probably have fewer takers.

If it works? Less scams for a change that could probably be done in a handful of minutes, which means less work for theymos.
If it doesn't work? It still slows down the scams even if it doesn't reduce the total amount, which would also mean less (frequent) work for theymos.


To me it's less about "more scammer tags" and more about deterring the scammers. You (understandably) don't have the time to monitor every single scam topic, so the goal should be reducing the amount or frequency of the scams that cause them.

You can't help those how can't help themselves.

I'm for a scammer committee.  Two or three trusted member or maybe more then you have an x of y votes to apply the tag.

Some guys can be VERY aggressive.    I know I jump the gun on occasion.  But I think it would work pretty well.  I would also put the community on notice that their trades are being policed.

We would also have to define SCAMMER.

My opinion it is a person who does not uphold their end of a deal after a period of time.  The scammer thread it a place to publicly debate it and if the scammer make good the tag gets removed.

I DO NOT think welshing on a bet is scamming.  So after the whole MNW debacle, even those he's an cocky arrogant asshole, I don't think he was a scammer.  But the scammer tag did seem to silence him.  So that was a good thing.

Just my 2c

How about a surety system instead of a rating system?

Yeah it's probably time to ditch the scammer tag system, the forum has grown too large for one, or even a few people to oversee and decide all scammer accusations, especially with how mind boggling irresponsible so many people are. There are also a lot more businesses, and people want scammer tags for something that, in the end really looks to just be bad customer service (maybe, I'm undecided). The benefit of a rating system would be that it's averaged, so one bad complaint won't tarnish your record, whereas now, it technically should get you a scammer tag. Should a business be judged on a single action? I don't think it should, should be weighted.

Downside is ratings can easily be faked or bought, I'm sure someone will mention Pirate had a perfect(?) otc score, but he also didn't have a scammer tag either (and technically wasn't one at the time). 
 

Yeah, I've been thinking about that lately. I've been getting really sick of dealing with scammer cases. It probably takes up a third of my admin time, and despite being nearly useless, it's always controversial.

However, I don't know that I can just let truly obvious scammers go without scammer tags. They'd become 1000-post VIP members and rip naïve newbies apart. And I can't give scammer tags to some obvious scammers and not others. We probably need to replace scammer tags with a web of trust rating system.

+1
If we say the mods are going to determine who is a scammer then we all need to pay .5BTC per month. That should be enough to hire 50 new mods with degrees in finance law.
The point of bitcoin is to have control over your money. That also means responsibility over it. All these new peers need to remember is...
1. Don't invest in anything you don't understand fully.

2. Don't lend or borrow bitcoins.

3. Practice high level security. If you don't understand PGP, VPN, cold storage, backups, two factor authentication, etc... Then learn before you buy coins.

You can fool proof anything but a better fool will come along.

Yeah, community policing seems to be the best way to deal with it. Tomatocage does an excellent job of that.

Some people are just beyond help though. 

lol I have done stupid things and people have laughed at me It always happens both ways though, what I'm tired of though is trying to warn people who should really know better and do their research before going into something new like Bitcoin then they inevitably come here blaming other people for things they've done.

Buyer Beware

Otherwise Bitcointalk turns into the US Social System

I think most of the time people can stop it simply by putting their opinion into the scam threads as they come across them.

We all have verbose opinions and love to type. 

If most people took a few seconds to identify the scam thread as they incidentally come across them by posting so in them, those threads would quickly fill with scam warnings.

Then we will have done all we can to protect our own reputations, because the scammers naturally try to mascarade as us, the non-scammers, and affect the reputation of this whole forum.

Cool. May what goes around come around to all of us! If you ever do something stupid, (which of course you never would because you are so smart and will never get old or sick) i hope the people around you just laugh at you. 

Lending should be renamed to "Give me 1 BTC and I'll send you back 1.05 BTC! kekek ^_^"

I posted this elsewhere, I had this thread in mind when I typed it up so thought I'd crosspost it here, it's mostly relevant and I don't want to respond here with a separate post saying pretty much the same thing.

(In response to several angry pms, I decided afterwards to build on it a bit, remove the quotes for readability/privacy, and post it publicly)
I don't do scammer tags dude, that's admins, not mods. I can request one, but I still have to meet the same burden of evidence as everyone else does, including you. I can't do anything you can't easily do yourself. Theymos has full and complete discretion regarding scammer tags, this is his forum. He also has a lot of duties and little time on his hands. We've tried outsourcing it, there's even a thread about it, but nobody really wants to do it in the end, especially for free. How much do you value your time? How long did it take you to decide to send that guy 500 dollars? How long do you expect someone else to spend deciding whether this guy should receive a scammer tag or not? How much do you think that guys time is worth?

What kind of deterrent would you suggest? What do you think will stop predators like this? They surround any forum related to money, it isn't just this forum, it's just more rampant because of no chargebacks, no authority to turn to, and the lack of personal responsibility so many have when it comes to their money because they are so used to depending on others (credit card companies or the bank for example). So they run to the forum in order to post a thread, get angry and try to pin all their problem on the forums and the big evil people who just won't give that totally anonymous guy the scammer tag he so richly deserves so he can be appropriately punished  .  

What I said was it's pretty much a waste of time to give him a tag. I don't think it's a complete waste of time to give him a scammer tag, and no that isn't "policy". If he did scam you he probably needs a scammer tag to save the next sucker, but he can easily make another account (IP's are easily faked or hidden) and those same dupes you linked me earlier that are in the process of perhaps getting scammed are just gonna get scammed anyway. They are sending money to a fresh account with 13 posts. It being a month old means nothing, the guy has probably scamming here for longer than a month if you just stop and think about the situation objectively. Any forum revolving around money is going to have scammers in the wings, and this one is no exception, probably even more so due to how easy bitcoin is to "play" with and the fact that the people who tend to get scammed via paypal/moneypak are young people wanting to buy drugs from wherever.

People who get scammed so easily are hurting this forum by bringing more and more scammers, and I hate seeing naive people like you (I really do hate it, that's why I ignore this subforum mostly, my time is better spent elsewhere)  lose their money to predators who scam, get tags, and just abandon the account and start again. I wouldn't be surprised if that guy has 50 accounts running through proxies, just scamming people left and right, just queueing up new accounts to replace the ones that get a tag. Banning won't help either.

I may be harsh, I may be a dick, but I won't apologize for it and I won't delete my posts. I love bitcoin and this forum (many hours of entertainment to be had here) and I hate seeing what it's turned into with how gullible people are and how easy it is to get scammed, and how rampant scamming is with a currency of this sort that has no failsafes.

It's actually been quite illuminating, I don't even know if people are ready for something like bitcoin. I've never been of the opinion that it will take over world trade and cause the end of the banks or whatever, it's just not very convenient for the kind of transactions I do daily. Maybe it will be in the future, maybe someone will build on it and use bitcoin and the blockchain as a backbone to do something really awesome. It's still useful, but it doesn't need to do everything to be useful and valuable.


Edit: Actually you know what, in the end I agree with you, we should just remove the scammer tag system. People depend on it too much and use it as justification to be dumb assholes and send money to anonymous people on the internet (who couldn't possibly be lying), then blame the forum for their dumb asshole mistakes so they don't have to admit they're a dumb asshole.  

Edit part deux:

Here, I'll one up you and quote the most important post in that thread. This whole post can be directed at you as well.


TLDR
People need to take more personal responsibility and stop depending on others to do things for them, and relying on scammer tags to keep you and your money safe is, in the end, just dumb. But if you send me a pm, I'll take time out of my weekend of liquor, card games, and women to try and get this guy the scammer tag he so richly deserves and ruin his reputation forever and ever, then everything will be ok and he will never ever come back.

I may be slightly jaded  .

Can we get rid of kijimo's confidence loans while we're at it? He and his poker friends are spamming the lending forum with their crapshoots. They're not even dealing in BTC.

It would be up to each user to establish who they trust the judgment of, was my point. If you made a "voting" system or central location, all it would do is encourage scammers to game that system.
Of course, there's no perfect defense against confidence scammers, but I like a web of trust approach better than an easily gamed central "scammer list". Hopefully it would take enough work to build trust, through many transactions, that even if the guy runs off with people's money or gets hit by a bus tomorrow and never logs on again, he would have provided more net value to the economy than he takes out.

Look how many previously trusted community members now wear the scammer tag.  People need to stop being so open-minded that their brains fall out.  This community vouching for the trustworthiness of its members hasn't worked too well so far and there's no reason to believe it would in the future.  It's a role/responsibility it should emphatically reject.