Important! Please suggest what you think we should do with people that scam forum members?

Thanks for all suggestions here keep them coming

We already considering some of the possible solutions to avoid fraud. Today we catched a well known scammer which got banned after only a few posts. He was also reported by some of the forum members here, thanks guys!
 
Reactions: helmax
I think you just need to make reputation more prominent. If you take a clue from localbitcoins.com for example where scams are rampant (you will get contacted by a scammer within 20 minutes if you are a market maker).

What they do is as a minimum make the number of trades ("depth") and independent (verified) users ("width") of a user known. Not only known, but prominently known. This is not a full solution, but at least a direction to go in.
 
Reactions: JohnLocke and negon
I m usual to buy things on different forums.
Few years ago I tried to buy also on the darker. I learnt my lessons , loosing money every deal.
Now I use escrow, if the seller agree then we go ahead, if he s not well no deal.
 
Reactions: JohnLocke
Thank you all for participating in this discussion.

We are working on a rating system, still in beta! For now I have requested all who were interested in advertising their services with a sales thread to provide a sample package. It won't be sufficient in order to know if this is a scam or not, however, it is something.

I would still advise people (which I already did with 3 forum members here) to be careful and do proper due diligence before you put your money in other people hands.
 
You could implement an autoshop feature where the funds will be held and keep a 2% escrow fee, which buyer and seller can mutual agree who pays it or they split. Apart from that one could use Bitify as an escrow for transactions done by bitcoins. Its a trusted site. Also the admin could check out their badge system, how the badges are progressive in nature and it could also help to filter out which seller is good enough to initiate a trade with. Buyers cannot scam sellers as well due to the escrow in place, they will have to put money beforehand in the escrow if they really want to take the service. Escrow and badge system is the only way to root out bad apples.
 
Reactions: JohnLocke
Great idea. So we will have to find some integrate Escrow System for this forum to be able to manage this.
The forum software is XenForo so you would need to find a developer who can build escrow plugin for it which you can easily integrate. I googled and it seems like many are looking for such plugin and developers and are not able to find any, maybe you would be able to find such developer. Or else who can build on a third party platform, and have users redirect there.
 
Using an external service would do it as a start. I think Admin would get too much work if he had to administrate this on external platform. BTW some particular you had in mind?
 
If Admin wants to be involved and also earn 1.5 to 2% from escrow for his efforts (he deserves it). First, He can setup a wordpress site purely for escrow reason which can be linked to this forum. He can easily find many wordpress developers to do that compared to finding developers for XenForo. Second (my preferred choice), he can setup OpenBazaar (OpenBazaar ) its a free cryto marketplace, built purely for setting up crypto sites/marketplaces. The Admin will not have to invest in developers, but only on hosting. Setup OpenBazaar purely for escrow and link it into this forum.

This option won't involve the Admin at all, these will be mutually decided between buyers and sellers, but this will only benefit the parties involved and not the forum as a whole, as others won't come to know if the seller/buyer are scammers, and it will be just lead to multiple threads of them accusing each other. They can use Bitify (my preferred choice), bitrated, escrowmybits.
 
Reactions: negon
No bad ideas here. But to as you already pointed out, OpenBazaar has some major security holes which need to be fixed before it could be used for Escrow services on this forum.
 
No bad ideas here. But to as you already pointed out, OpenBazaar has some major security holes which need to be fixed before it could be used for Escrow services on this forum.
No, I didn't mean it has security issues, I meant if Admin wants to up the security more, to his satisfaction level . Like some are super paranoid when it comes to security and have 10 things in place before they can actually login into their account.
 
Reactions: Spinat
This seems indeed to be a great idea in order to avoid scam and to find a quick solution.