Someone should sticky this one.

See, I read these threads late at night to bore myself to sleep and what happens? Someone makes me laugh.

Well played, sir.

Yeah i remember when people had been super paranoid and ended up labeling me or at least nearly so as a scammer for at least a night, think i am still on one persons ignore because of that.

The wakalo guy is such a douche and i am quite surprised they have yet to truly ban him (assuming they tried)

Its next to impossible. It takes two seconds to make a new account.

Guessing some sort of ip ban or something of the like would not work? That blows it sucks that people like that have to come along and spread their scum around.

But in truth it's a strong community as long as we pull together and just be vigilant and try to resist letting him get to us he will eventually get bored.

What we need is to get newbies who aspire to the trading thread to read this thread first. Most experienced traders insist that the newbie send their part first so something needs to be worked out where people with no previous rep could trade through a third party.

maybe one of the men in blue (that's a movie i'd pay to see!) can arrange something.

Either that or older members who hang around enough to be available for that sort of thing. They already mad that movie btw (its called Wolf of Wallstreet)

i meant men in black meets blue man group.
that might make an interesting film.

in my other forum, one of precaution to deal with scam on online trade are using middleman. ie: trader a send a code, trader b send the code, the middleman confirmed both trade are fine and then send both trade on the opposite direction. it wasn't perfect off course the middleman may corrupt them self or even working together with one of the involved parties, but def help to reduce scam freq. (not to mention the fee def help their motivation ;p)

wpegg once attempted to introduce such a system i think.

wpegg, if it wasn't you but some other smart fellow, i'm sorry for whoever i wronged by misattributing.

i could quite understand if the hasle isn't worth it for some people, but face it, on internet out side hope and pray , when you click that trade/sent button there nothing effectively could help to stop experience scammer, esp if you didn't have the time and resource to handle the negative side effect. which is why for me, i prefer online for quick trade price survey before making purchase on real world. (reputable store with real live presence and clear address difference off course but still)

I've said this before but some of the Steam safeguards do help (if people actually utilize them in advance). Do your homework by
1) asking for the traders current Steam/Desura account name and
2) ask for a specific phrase to be posted on each traders tagline as proof and
3) then checking out Steamrep or asking GOG members if someone is trusted.

If you are the one that goes first in the trade and are subsequently robbed, at least you have some back-up proof that the scammer has an alt-account and can share that with other people AND can report them to Steam/GOG/etc...

Not really, the thread is tolerated, but why on Earth should GOG be responsible for this? People who choose to trade with people they don't know are going to get scammed eventually. It sucks, but a thread like this just encourages people to take risks that they shouldn't be taking.
IP bans never work. Not in the modern era where pretty much everybody is using dynamic IPs that can and do change regularly. I've used IPs were somebody had banned the IP and it pretty much pissed me off enough that I didn't do business with them.

And that's assuming that people aren't using VPNs and disposable IPs.

I suggest making a new subforum for game trades and giveaways, and restricting that to only users who have bought games with their own money.

Probably not doable with the current forum system, though....