Quote Originally Posted by ByodoM View Post
Alright, so before you start reading, there’s one thing that must be made clear:

That no matter how well you try to prevent people from getting scammed, they will. However, you can implement certain rules and restrictions to make it a lot harder for people to get scammed (especially exit-scams). At the end of the day, greed is human nature and you can never truly trust people over the internet.

I’ve been here a short while but I’ve already seen 2 large scale exit scams by “reputable” users (CucuYeL and Vaypah). They both gained trust over time by being friendly, acting professional and overall just being extra nice to people and acting knowledgeable on certain topics.
I personally helped around 13 different people successfully chargeback via PayPal when they got scammed by CucuYeL even though the payments were sent as Friends and family. I’ve also seen more people offering their help and services to make this Vaypah scam a little less painful to deal with.

So there remains the question of how you can make things better. How can you make traders less prone to scams? How does the MPGH staff help ensure the minimum possible risk of people being a part of something like this?

It’s going to take some effort and re-working of the way things are currently being run. For starters and something that has already been suggested by many people:

I. Middle-Man system.

I’ve already seen @arunforce ‘s reply to that, in him saying:

“Yeah! Not only are they working for free, we will take their money from them too! Flocks of people will be lining up around the corner. Brilliant!”

Obviously a very valid point. However, there are still possible solutions to this to help everyone feel rewarded, safer and to properly implement the Middle man system.

For starters, Middlemen should be charging a fee for their service. Although some sites offer this service for free, and people are free to make donations to the middleman, there’s also several sites/services that offer middleman services with a certain fee so as to not waste the Middleman’s time.

Furthermore, implementing much higher requirements and a very rigorous process for people to qualify for becoming a Middleman will further help. Some examples I can think of as requirements are:

• 5,000+ Posts.
• At least 2 years of activity on MPGH (cumulative).
• Preferably a moderator/minion.

That’s just rough requirements that I could think of to justify someone having that middleman tag.

II. Restricting titles.

Now what do I mean by this? Well, for example:

Most people who scam others have the Anti-scam user tag or a similar title that somehow “proves” that they’re legit. I know most traders will know that this isn’t a sign of trust but to a new user or anyone else, they may get influenced by that and put their trust into those users.
So, simply by restricting image titles, titles and signatures that may mislead someone into thinking that the person they’re speaking with is reputable… it should further reduce the chances of new users and old ones alike from getting scammed.

III. Currency exchange requirements.

Perhaps one of the most common scam. A new/slightly known user posts a currency exchange thread. Garners interest and a real vouch from someone trustworthy and then others assuming that person is “legit”, then go on to place their orders but ultimately get scammed.

As with the middle-man requirement suggestion, I’d suggest getting at least some sort of requirement/qualifications necessary before you’re able to make a thread there. Maybe even some sort of max currency allowed to be exchanged by certain users limit would work.

IV. Vouch requirements.

Now this is something that is going to be an unpopular opinion but honestly, the vouch requirements should be higher and not solely based upon the number of posts and being here for 3 months.

Something along the lines of raising the requirements to something like this:

• 2,000 posts.
• 5 months membership.
• Approved by the majority of the marketplace staff.

Now that last one in there adds a bit of annoyance to both the marketplace staff and the person applying as they’ll have to go through an additional screening process. However, this will help the marketplace staff/admins to differentiate between someone who’s simply been posting to get the voucher status and someone who doesn’t “shitpost” and genuinely posts when they feel they’re making an actual suggestion/adding value to a conversation/discussion.

Those are just some of the suggestions I have and I will be making more detailed suggestions regarding this matter soon. Those were just some ideas off the top of my head that could perhaps work and help the entire MPGH community.

I'm interested in hearing what you think of these suggestions @Dave84311 , @arunforce , @Flengo , @Hero , @Hugo Boss , @Hunter , @Psychotic , @Hova , @DarkLordXYZ , @Saboteur
I like the last idea.