This might be a silly/too much trouble kind of suggestion, but for the time being what if Ian made a thread with a list of new users that have proved to be trustworthy? That way older members will immediately know that certain people are less risky to trade with and younger members will hopefully have less distrust to deal with.

This is in addition to the minimum reputation thing. Also, If I remember correctly, Anasto used beta codes, so it might be best that beta codes don't count towards a person being deemed trustworthy.

Note that this wouldn't make you "safe". It's not too difficult to rack up reputation points.

It _would_ make scamming a bit more difficult though. And in the end, protection on the Internet is mostly achieved not by making the scam impossible, but by making it hard enough to make the scammers look for easier hunting grounds.

The escrow system suggested by wpegg _would_ provide very good protection though, but would of course require additional effort with every trade that makes use of it.

Which issue are we talking about now. As I see it there are 2 issues. Firstly there's the issue of someone fraudulently scamming someone out of a code. Then there's the issue of someone that's not welcome gaining a gift code.

I am afraid to say it, but Steam has solved these problems already. We just need to emulate that.

As I said, I'll put together some kind of trading mechanism on my website next weekend that will validate both persons codes. That will cure the fraud problem. Inviting people into your gifts - you're into the "SteamGifts" world, which in itself invites deception in order to get into the club.

it is not my place to judge if someone is trustworthy. when u think about your suggestion, the responsibility is enourmas, and could cause major "conversations"

About the giveaways grabbers, why not put a rule like the user needs to have been a user at least a month or so (or even a year but that might be stretching it) and like 10 reputation. Also, a script is based upon repeating behaviour. People could also always do something different like asking specific questions about similar games so you will need to do some googling to win.

I know u are clever mate, I look forward to seeing what you put together, and thank you :)

Yeah, +1 to Ian for this thread - I actually (and naïvely, come to think of it) didn't know this was happening until I read this thread. It really angers me to think that people have been preying on the kindness of the people on the community. And by its very nature, it's something that GOG can't do anything about; I think the onus is on us to be vigilant and point out offenders before they cause serious damage.

I think in the future for any giveaways I'll hold, I'll have a rule of "minimum +10 rep and 30+ days membership" for anyone who wants to take part. It goes against my ethos of trying to have things be as fair and equitable as possible, but it's a tradeoff I'll have to make.

Come'on Man :/ I don't want my second account to be revealed :( !

I didn't mean to have judge you anyone. There are people who trade in good faith with others that are new to the forums, despite the whole wakalo thing, and might be able to vouch for them from personal experience.
Obviously nothing can stop a scammer from acting nice for a while so as to get on the list and then start scamming people, and there are also the issues that you mentioned, but this is only meant to make things a little more difficult for scammers until wpegg works his magic. That's why I wrote "for the time being".

Don't forget to ask specific questions and you don't have to make them complicated, just something to put off a scammer with scripts. Ask users to write a picture or something. :P

this is truly sad corruption has crept into our awesome community :( , we should have take the initiative ourselves by only letting people who are at least 2 or 3 months old , into the giveaways ,trades etc rep requirement would be good too but not too extreme numbers.

gog mods are probably working on releasing some new game here

also we should also probably start a new thread " list of scammers / multi accounts on gog" where the said persons would be listed with proof , so if gog decides to take action they may find it easy to find the bad apples.....and do something about it

this hurts though , i mean we had people back in the days making accounts to troll and start flame wars but...no to steal games and cheat others...........

GOG could implement a trading service. But I have this iffy feeling it will detract from the awesome community we have here. No more giveaway threads, no more trade threads. And those are part of the charm.

I'm all for us the community moderating ourselves. We just got scammers, now we'll have to figure a good way to reduce the potential for scams. Good thing we talk about it, atleast everyone knows we have idiots and leechers here now (sigh, this foul internet has infected my precious GoG)

Eh? I doubt scammers use the codes they gather to activate on their scamming account, they probably use it on the original one. After all the original is clean and if they're smart they also use proxies or other means to avoid IP bans as well. However I agree that they should ban IPs just in case but also accounts as well. After all as SimonG said:

They should not ban IPs. It's a silly idea, IPs are dynamically assigned, the one you have today, is someone else's tomorrow. How would you like to be banned because someone else did something?