Silk Road forums
Support => Feature requests => Topic started by: ytabletrash on August 21, 2013, 05:03 am
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Recently (and currently) it has become pretty obvious that PlanetExpress is pulling a FE scam. Now, I understand that vendors shouldnt have their vendor status changed because of a couple people dont get their orders. But I believe in a case such as this where ALL items bought are FEs and NOTHING is showing up, the admins should be able to freeze withdrawals. Of course if the vendor's customers started to report deliveries and turns out to be legit then the money would be unfrozen. The fact that the admins are idly sitting by while this vendor has run off with over 17 grand off customers is ridiculous. Seriously I dont know why this has not been implemented before. I mean, hell you guys banned a vendor for joking about jenkem but cant stop a vendor from doing serious harm to the community? Proper moderation is needed in all markets and it is SERIOUSLY lacking here on the road.
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I mean, I have seen a number of FE scams and it seems it always takes a week for the community to realize what is going on and 3 weeks + for the admins to realize it.
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ETM, lucydrop, tony76, jimmy buffet, i can list a bunch more scammers that many of us warned SR about and SR waited until they made off with a shit load of BTC before SR acted.. I can agree on one point that you cant stop morons from FEing, but SR can limit the amount a vendor can have in FE's and his listings freeze when he exceeds that. a vendor can have as many orders in escrow as they want. but when you see 5 pages of FE and the forums are lit up with no orders being received thats BS...many of the buyers are domestic and it dont take 8 days to get a letter. i have received stuff from Germany, UK and canada in 7 days. the other idea is to limit the amount of FEs a vendor can ask for in a weeks time. than they lose it for a week... by than most orders should be received within 14 days. If you have the smarts to develop SR, finding a way to curb this kind of abuse should be easy.
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Recently (and currently) it has become pretty obvious that PlanetExpress is pulling a FE scam. Now, I understand that vendors shouldnt have their vendor status changed because of a couple people dont get their orders. But I believe in a case such as this where ALL items bought are FEs and NOTHING is showing up, the admins should be able to freeze withdrawals. Of course if the vendor's customers started to report deliveries and turns out to be legit then the money would be unfrozen. The fact that the admins are idly sitting by while this vendor has run off with over 17 grand off customers is ridiculous. Seriously I dont know why this has not been implemented before. I mean, hell you guys banned a vendor for joking about jenkem but cant stop a vendor from doing serious harm to the community? Proper moderation is needed in all markets and it is SERIOUSLY lacking here on the road.
I'm not sure you understand what you're suggesting, would you be comfortable if Silk Road had the ability to go in and remove Bitcoin from known scamming Buyer Accounts? In fact it doesn't really matter if the Account is a Scammer, if I knew Silk Road had the potential to remove all funds from every single Account with the push of a button I would be a lot more worried about that than some scamming Vendor. There's a good reason Silk Road only has authority over Escrow, the second FE is initiated the Buyer is essentially saying "I trust the Vendor, I do not want the services provided by Silk Road to prevent me from getting scammed".
ETM, lucydrop, tony76, jimmy buffet, i can list a bunch more scammers that many of us warned SR about and SR waited until they made off with a shit load of BTC before SR acted.. I can agree on one point that you cant stop morons from FEing, but SR can limit the amount a vendor can have in FE's and his listings freeze when he exceeds that. a vendor can have as many orders in escrow as they want. but when you see 5 pages of FE and the forums are lit up with no orders being received thats BS...many of the buyers are domestic and it dont take 8 days to get a letter. i have received stuff from Germany, UK and canada in 7 days. the other idea is to limit the amount of FEs a vendor can ask for in a weeks time. than they lose it for a week... by than most orders should be received within 14 days. If you have the smarts to develop SR, finding a way to curb this kind of abuse should be easy.
The is actually a very reasonable Compromise, after X amount of complaints the Listings of the Vendor in question lose the ability of Finalizing Early entirely and work as Escrow only until either a sufficient explanation has been given by the Vendor or when Silk Road is done investigating the complaints and manually activate FE capability again. The only problem with this solution is scamming Buyers who could intentionally prevent big-time Vendors who all rely on FE to function, most likely unfortunately nothing like this will get implemented because of this very reason.
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Im not sure if you understand that SR DOES have access to all of our wallets... How do you think they take their fee? The bitcoin in SR is in the trust of a few people, but they know they will make a lot more money in the long run by NOT touching the money held in SR. When vendors get banned and they still have $ sitting in their wallet?
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Im not sure if you understand that SR DOES have access to all of our wallets... How do you think they take their fee? The bitcoin in SR is in the trust of a few people, but they know they will make a lot more money in the long run by NOT touching the money held in SR. When vendors get banned and they still have $ sitting in their wallet?
This is basically arguing about semantics, but the fees are obviously not taken until an order has been made just as a bank in the real world will ( usually ) not withdraw all the money without someone actually making an order which requires withdrawing money from the account. I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here, I'm wrong because Silk Road could technically shut down the site and steal all money?
Vendors don't get banned in the traditional sense as most understand it, they get demoted to an ordinary account which they can still use - just not sell anything. Or do you suggest that when BruceCampbell got his Vending Privileges revoked ( http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=193372 ) Silk Road should have stepped in and taken all money from his account because you think that's what should be done when Vendors break rules? ::)
Luckily we have the Administration we do at the moment and not someone who would go in and steal money from others entirely based on the whims of personal thoughts and/or how much others are complaining, if you want a System with charge backs and Freezing Accounts you always have the option to use PayPal.
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Now the problem itself remains and there's no solution for it at the moment, but one thing that struck me is that the thing that is supposed to dissuade Vendors from pulling a FE scam is the Vendor Bond, and I would guess in almost all cases they either don't care if it's lost or they've already retrieved it. Perhaps some kind of middle ground solution would be to have a separate FE Bond which can be applied for after the normal Bond has been returned and it would cost significantly more than the ordinary Bond. If that specific Vendor were to pull a FE scam at the very least the Funds from the FE Bond could be distributed among the Buyers who were affected. If the Vendor decides in this hypothetical scenario to longer requiring FE he would be able at any time to deactivate the FE bond and receive all funds spent for it. :)
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same reason paypal and visa let scammers scam, they make money off of it. u want sr staff to start selectively freezing accounts, like our dark overlords currently do? this is a free market, a fool and his money will soon part ways.
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I think a good compromise would be a system where new vendors aren't allowed to withdrawal any BTC for the first X days of operating, like 30. I know this might make it hard for smaller and new vendors to first start out, but if looking at it from a business perspective, if this was just the way it was to be a vendor, you would have to plan for this initial period of startup cost. I know this wouldn't do much to stop the long-con scamming, but it might help with all the hit-n-go type FE scammer vendors that have been appearing.
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I think a good compromise would be a system where new vendors aren't allowed to withdrawal any BTC for the first X days of operating, like 30. I know this might make it hard for smaller and new vendors to first start out, but if looking at it from a business perspective, if this was just the way it was to be a vendor, you would have to plan for this initial period of startup cost. I know this wouldn't do much to stop the long-con scamming, but it might help with all the hit-n-go type FE scammer vendors that have been appearing.
You can't be serious? This is multitudes worse than what has been proposed in this thread so far, how you even managed to form an idea like this is utterly beyond me. :o
Why is it that some people think this issue can somehow be solved by applying regulation directly to the fund system? Sure it would solve the problem, until the set amount of time had passed and the scammer would do it anyway. Meanwhile Silk Road would get 90 % less Vendors during this time and it would make scamming extremely profitable since so few new Vendors register, brilliant. :-X
The only way this problem is going to be solved is by modifying the Finalize Early Concept so it can handle scammers ( by temporarily locking the ability after a certain amount of Reports for example ) or Buyers banding together and creating an Insurance of sorts ( not very likely Silk Road will help creating anything like this as it would acknowledge there's a problem with scammers to begin with ).