Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: Cork1Screw on July 18, 2013, 11:17 pm
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Lottery games are quickly making buyer stats completely worthless.
If you haven't yet realized, buyers can essentially make a new account and build up a large number of transactions AND total bitcoin spent -- all while spending very little actual money.
I wont give any specific listings or links but there are several lottery games available now with a very low house advantage that let people, for example, "spend" 10 bitcoin but end up getting 9+ of it back. This makes them look like very big legitimate customers to vendors...
I hope this isn't being taken advantage of yet, but if it isn't it no doubt will be soon. I had second thoughts about one of the lottery listings I made because of this and actually thought about pulling it but someone has already copied the idea and made their own similar listing so that wont solve the problem. For now I just try to monitor users who have high refund rates and seem to be trying to lower them using the lottery and deny them service, but that doesn't really address the whole issue. Smarter scammers will use the lottery to build up high reputation for near nothing before scamming rather than the other way around.
I don't think I should need to mention that if I had a vendetta against any certain vendor, I could create 10 different accounts, pump them all up to very high rankings, and quickly ruin a seller's reputation, for very little cost except time to myself. Will the admins be able to correctly discern that the vendor is not the scammer when seemingly "10 different people" all with good buyer stats are complaining at once? Maybe.
We need some method to see more about the buyer stats, or some type of additional system in place. Quickly.
People who have all of their spent BTC in a lottery game should not look the same to vendors as people who have actually ordered illegal goods - there is a huge difference in customer credibility there. I hate to say it, but something like Atlantis has done shouldn't be overlooked at least as a brainstorming point.
If not that, maybe just make a specific category in buyer stats that shows what % of that buyer's spendings were done in the Lotteries & Games category. That way if a vendor gets an order from a buyer that appears to be a "big spender," they will know it's only been on lotteries and can be more careful. This seems like at least a good first preventative step to me, without compromising anyone's anonymity too much.
I believe this is something that needs to be addressed quickly, to be frank, which is why I am posting it here.
I don't yet have access to the vendor's discussion area but I would appreciate if a mod could perhaps move this post there ASAP, as it seems a more appropriate location.
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Oh don't worry plenty of us that play them are getting fucked by not getting paid when we win. I played Walmart's lottery and lost many times, and he was very quick to want those finalized. So I obliged since I lost. Of course the one time I win, two weeks ago, the fucking excuses start flowing out of this guy. Short on money, he only ships two days a week, then he only ships when he has multiple winners, and then he tries to get you to FE promising "it's on it's way." Haven't gotten shit from this guy but managed to receive ever other order I have made from as far away as Germany. So while you are so worried about buyer stats, your fellow vendors are doing the same damn thing to pad their stats so that when they fail to pay off the occasional winning bet it hardly affects them to get 1/5 feedback. Vendors abuse it as much as any buyer. Especially the ones running lotteries for products they don't even have to pay off winners.
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Posted something about lotteries somewhere last night while drunk and correct me if I'm wrong but can a new vendor, start a lottery to gain enough transactions quickly that gets them to the level of transactions required that allows them to request users to FE setting folk up to be scammed?
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Oh don't worry plenty of us that play them are getting fucked by not getting paid when we win. I played Walmart's lottery and lost many times, and he was very quick to want those finalized. So I obliged since I lost. Of course the one time I win, two weeks ago, the fucking excuses start flowing out of this guy. Short on money, he only ships two days a week, then he only ships when he has multiple winners, and then he tries to get you to FE promising "it's on it's way." Haven't gotten shit from this guy but managed to receive ever other order I have made from as far away as Germany. So while you are so worried about buyer stats, your fellow vendors are doing the same damn thing to pad their stats so that when they fail to pay off the occasional winning bet it hardly affects them to get 1/5 feedback. Vendors abuse it as much as any buyer. Especially the ones running lotteries for products they don't even have to pay off winners.
Oh I agree with you. I didn't want to sling any shit around at other vendors but no doubt it's being taken advantage of on both sides. It just doesn't work with the current feedback system at all from any perspective. Breaks it really.
Posted something about lotteries somewhere last night while drunk and correct me if I'm wrong but can a new vendor, start a lottery to gain enough transactions quickly that gets them to the level of transactions required that allows them to request users to FE setting folk up to be scammed?
I don't think so. I think there is also a time period associated with it. Can be abused in other ways though.
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Simple solution: full buyer's feedback (that naturally should include a way to check the type of transactions on both parts).
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Simple solution: full buyer's feedback (that naturally should include a way to check the type of transactions on both parts).
i'm all for this. not happy with the new feedback system at all - in just under 2 years i've been here i've just had my first refund ever for 75% because it didn't show and despite the fact i've got nearly £20k spent, 0% auto finalize i've now got a nasty 35% refund rate in the last month, so i'm fucked twice - once by customs and again by my feedback. you can guarantee that 35% is going to make the vendor of my next purchase ask me to FE. or i can wait 3 months for it to get pushed back to the 'year' in the feedback bit before i buy again
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Often (usually?), lotteries are bad and people who play them are either stupid or trying to cheat the systems that protect people from scammers. Banning them does not seem like an acceptable strategy on a site that is all about freedom. The freedom to try stupid things is a big part of what SR is all about. Banning vendors who advertise them as a way to boost reputation seems like a good idea. But they would have to be warned and then most would hide their worst advertisements to avoid losing their account(s). The OP of this thread, for instance, seems to have created a great advertisement for their reputation boosting lottery while complaining about how bad it is.
Setting up a separate gambling system that does not factor into SR reputation stats might be a good strategy. You can't just have the vendors voluntarily label their gambling as such to exclude it from affecting stats and expect that to fix the problem, though. It is a challenging problem to solve in a way that does not create a lot of work for admins. A community effort to list the vendors who do it in an attempt to cast dispersions and ridicule upon them is tempting :-). Trying to sort the "bad intentioned" from those who just want to make money from the stupid noobs that can't wait for a chance to try something stupid repeatedly, would be nearly impossible much of the time.
As a vendor, I'd like to be able to see what buyers have purchased in the past. I don't really think I should be able to see that though. If I could, bad vendors could rename their lottery items as seemingly legit items. It might be nice for SR to have a list of vendors who sell questionable products and then have the stats of a buyer display in a different color based on how much of their purchases came from "bad-listed" vendors? Green-yellow-red might be a scale of trustability for a buyers stats. Sadly that seems very difficult to automate without way too much ongoing work for staff.
It is an exciting time to vend on SR, lol :-)
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Often (usually?), lotteries are bad and people who play them are either stupid or trying to cheat the systems that protect people from scammers. Banning them does not seem like an acceptable strategy on a site that is all about freedom. The freedom to try stupid things is a big part of what SR is all about. Banning vendors who advertise them as a way to boost reputation seems like a good idea. But they would have to be warned and then most would hide their worst advertisements to avoid losing their account(s). The OP of this thread, for instance, seems to have created a great advertisement for their reputation boosting lottery while complaining about how bad it is.
Setting up a separate gambling system that does not factor into SR reputation stats might be a good strategy. You can't just have the vendors voluntarily label their gambling as such to exclude it from affecting stats and expect that to fix the problem, though. It is a challenging problem to solve in a way that does not create a lot of work for admins. A community effort to list the vendors who do it in an attempt to cast dispersions and ridicule upon them is tempting :-). Trying to sort the "bad intentioned" from those who just want to make money from the stupid noobs that can't wait for a chance to try something stupid repeatedly, would be nearly impossible much of the time.
As a vendor, I'd like to be able to see what buyers have purchased in the past. I don't really think I should be able to see that though. If I could, bad vendors could rename their lottery items as seemingly legit items. It might be nice for SR to have a list of vendors who sell questionable products and then have the stats of a buyer display in a different color based on how much of their purchases came from "bad-listed" vendors? Green-yellow-red might be a scale of trustability for a buyers stats. Sadly that seems very difficult to automate without way too much ongoing work for staff.
It is an exciting time to vend on SR, lol :-)
hi hi
not sure if anyone looked at it, or what ya'll think - but i made a post in the feature request section with a solution i came up with that i think would alleviate most/all of the concerns everyone is having with these silly lotteries.
granted, it's not the simplest thing for an admin to whip up, but i tried to think of all angles to make it fair while resistant to abuse.
xoxo
-mb
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For the record, I run a completely legit lotto, announced a winner publicly, & gave out free samples to the people who played....
We're not all bad.
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For the record, I run a completely legit lotto, announced a winner publicly, & gave out free samples to the people who played....
We're not all bad.
Reread the original post. He is talking about buyers building up huge fake stats.
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Lottery vendor chiming in here.
While I see the OP's point ultimately I don't think they help buyers build up their stats that much as 50 transactions with total spend of $40 in the last month isn't going to fool any vendor when they look at the breakdown and see lots of tiny $$value purchases
Even though I'm sure I offer the best value lottery on the road it's also still not worth paying 15% (SR commission + hedge + 2% house) just to get your money back playing my games (assuming you play long enough to even out the odds)
I'd much rather spend my money on drugs even to build up my feedback but to be honest sometimes I just have a few cents left and say "If I get lucky I'll buy such and such"
If it's about trying to mask refund rates I'm not even sure are they calculated from amount spent or % of refunded transactions but either way It should be up to SR to make sure that the refund rate calculation is based on relevant figures
One thing I would like to see is the scam lottery's got rid of and by that I mean the ones who have no independent variable that chooses the winner such as the last digit of the TX# . Many vendor lotteries for drugs just say they will pick someone at random and I wonder how often is that "someone random" just a shill account of theirs :-\ :-\
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Lottery vendor chiming in here.
While I see the OP's point ultimately I don't think they help buyers build up their stats that much as 50 transactions with total spend of $40 in the last month isn't going to fool any vendor when they look at the breakdown and see lots of tiny $$value purchases
Even though I'm sure I offer the best value lottery on the road it's also still not worth paying 15% (SR commission + hedge + 2% house) just to get your money back playing my games (assuming you play long enough to even out the odds)
I'd much rather spend my money on drugs even to build up my feedback but to be honest but sometimes I have a few cents left and say "If I get lucky I'll buy such and such"
If it's about trying to mask refund rates I'm not even sure are they calculated from amount spent or % refunded transactions but either way It should be up to SR to make sure it's relevant after all this is a free marketplace.
One thing I would like to see is the scam lottery's got rid of and by that I mean the ones who have no independent variable that chooses the winner such as the last digit of the TX# . Many vendor lotteries for drugs just say they will pick someone at random and I wonder how often is that "someone random" just a shill account of theirs :-\ :-\
This is what I was too lazy to type, Jack...
lol.
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Often (usually?), lotteries are bad and people who play them are either stupid or trying to cheat the systems that protect people from scammers. Banning them does not seem like an acceptable strategy on a site that is all about freedom. The freedom to try stupid things is a big part of what SR is all about. Banning vendors who advertise them as a way to boost reputation seems like a good idea. But they would have to be warned and then most would hide their worst advertisements to avoid losing their account(s). The OP of this thread, for instance, seems to have created a great advertisement for their reputation boosting lottery while complaining about how bad it is.
If I'm not mistaken you just subtly recommended to ban me.
Setting up a separate gambling system that does not factor into SR reputation stats might be a good strategy. You can't just have the vendors voluntarily label their gambling as such to exclude it from affecting stats and expect that to fix the problem, though. It is a challenging problem to solve in a way that does not create a lot of work for admins. A community effort to list the vendors who do it in an attempt to cast dispersions and ridicule upon them is tempting :-). Trying to sort the "bad intentioned" from those who just want to make money from the stupid noobs that can't wait for a chance to try something stupid repeatedly, would be nearly impossible much of the time.
So I take it you have a very puritanical view on gambling.
As a vendor, I'd like to be able to see what buyers have purchased in the past. I don't really think I should be able to see that though. If I could, bad vendors could rename their lottery items as seemingly legit items. It might be nice for SR to have a list of vendors who sell questionable products and then have the stats of a buyer display in a different color based on how much of their purchases came from "bad-listed" vendors? Green-yellow-red might be a scale of trustability for a buyers stats. Sadly that seems very difficult to automate without way too much ongoing work for staff.
It is an exciting time to vend on SR, lol :-)
I think seeing what buyers have purchased in the past, at least in some capacity, is certainly one way of solving the problem. You say that you don't think that should happen because "bad vendors could rename their lottery items as seemingly legit items," but I don't really understand your point there. As far as I am aware, you cannot edit the title of listings. Everything else, but not the title. I may be mistaken of course but this is my knowledge of it.
Lottery vendor chiming in here.
While I see the OP's point ultimately I don't think they help buyers build up their stats that much as 50 transactions with total spend of $40 in the last month isn't going to fool any vendor when they look at the breakdown and see lots of tiny $$value purchases
Even though I'm sure I offer the best value lottery on the road it's also still not worth paying 15% (SR commission + hedge + 2% house) just to get your money back playing my games (assuming you play long enough to even out the odds)
I'd much rather spend my money on drugs even to build up my feedback but to be honest sometimes I just have a few cents left and say "If I get lucky I'll buy such and such"
If it's about trying to mask refund rates I'm not even sure are they calculated from amount spent or % of refunded transactions but either way It should be up to SR to make sure that the refund rate calculation is based on relevant figures
One thing I would like to see is the scam lottery's got rid of and by that I mean the ones who have no independent variable that chooses the winner such as the last digit of the TX# . Many vendor lotteries for drugs just say they will pick someone at random and I wonder how often is that "someone random" just a shill account of theirs :-\ :-\
I agree with you about the latter part of your post - I have thought about how the TX# lotteries could be more integrated into the system but it seems like a lot of work for the admins where there are more pressing all encompassing issues like buyer feedback in general.
However the former part of your post is exactly why I made this thread (regarding a small $value and large # of transactions). Because that's not the case anymore. You can make a small number of transactions for a high value now. That is a bit of a game changer.
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I think the best solution would be to update the buyer feedback to display to vendors what the transation were for.
Was it drugs? Or lotteries?
That alone would help me who I want to deal with and who I don't want to deal with I would think.
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there have always been ways to dodge buyer stats. it's nothing new really. what do you think all the ebooks are for? it's not like anyone actually reads that rubbish. total spend is only a bit harder
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Often (usually?), lotteries are bad and people who play them are either stupid or trying to cheat the systems that protect people from scammers. Banning them does not seem like an acceptable strategy on a site that is all about freedom. The freedom to try stupid things is a big part of what SR is all about. Banning vendors who advertise them as a way to boost reputation seems like a good idea. But they would have to be warned and then most would hide their worst advertisements to avoid losing their account(s). The OP of this thread, for instance, seems to have created a great advertisement for their reputation boosting lottery while complaining about how bad it is.
If I'm not mistaken you just subtly recommended to ban me.
Warn you first and ban you if you continue to show intent to subvert the feedback system vendors use to protect themselves from scammers, yes. I really don't mean to pick on you specifically. Was just trying to point out that it would be hard to tell who was trying to help scammers subvert the feedback system.
Setting up a separate gambling system that does not factor into SR reputation stats might be a good strategy. You can't just have the vendors voluntarily label their gambling as such to exclude it from affecting stats and expect that to fix the problem, though. It is a challenging problem to solve in a way that does not create a lot of work for admins. A community effort to list the vendors who do it in an attempt to cast dispersions and ridicule upon them is tempting :-). Trying to sort the "bad intentioned" from those who just want to make money from the stupid noobs that can't wait for a chance to try something stupid repeatedly, would be nearly impossible much of the time.
So I take it you have a very puritanical view on gambling.
Not really. True fair gambling with no noticeable "house" advantage does not bother me unless it is used in a way that is not fair. I have seen a lot of online "gambling" used to trick the unsuspecting out of their $ with lose-lose opportunities and scams. Terrible odds that are not clearly stated also bother me.
As a vendor, I'd like to be able to see what buyers have purchased in the past. I don't really think I should be able to see that though. If I could, bad vendors could rename their lottery items as seemingly legit items. It might be nice for SR to have a list of vendors who sell questionable products and then have the stats of a buyer display in a different color based on how much of their purchases came from "bad-listed" vendors? Green-yellow-red might be a scale of trustability for a buyers stats. Sadly that seems very difficult to automate without way too much ongoing work for staff.
It is an exciting time to vend on SR, lol :-)
I think seeing what buyers have purchased in the past, at least in some capacity, is certainly one way of solving the problem. You say that you don't think that should happen because "bad vendors could rename their lottery items as seemingly legit items," but I don't really understand your point there. As far as I am aware, you cannot edit the title of listings. Everything else, but not the title. I may be mistaken of course but this is my knowledge of it.
The problem is you could make a new listing for, say, an OZ of weed at $280. Then you tell people to buy that if they want to bet $280 on your lotto and have their stats look great. If you still don't get what I'm saying, that's probably a good thing.
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hi hi
i dunno about ya'll, but for me, before i even begin to look at the buyer's name or address i check out the stats. ALWAYS. after that, it's copy paste to search for blacklist.
if all checks out then it's good to look at address and ship.
if those stats arent grooving with me then i'm cancelling. that includes lottery players with 80 transactions for a total of 200$ spent. that's clearly BS and i know it as such. i'm more interested in the buyer's AVERAGE price per transaction. that will paint me a "truer" picture of the buyer than simply total sales. IMHO, total sales is and always has been BS. AVG price is the way to go
i still think it would be ideal to have a separate listing "type" for lotto specifically, as i had suggested in feature req forum, however this would require a fair bit of work on SR's part since all the odds would have to be done via the site to maintain fairness. and the order/feedback system would need to be slightly modified for those tickets too.
xoxo
-mb
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hi hi
i dunno about ya'll, but for me, before i even begin to look at the buyer's name or address i check out the stats. ALWAYS. after that, it's copy paste to search for blacklist.
if all checks out then it's good to look at address and ship.
if those stats arent grooving with me then i'm cancelling. that includes lottery players with 80 transactions for a total of 200$ spent. that's clearly BS and i know it as such. i'm more interested in the buyer's AVERAGE price per transaction. that will paint me a "truer" picture of the buyer than simply total sales. IMHO, total sales is and always has been BS. AVG price is the way to go
i still think it would be ideal to have a separate listing "type" for lotto specifically, as i had suggested in feature req forum, however this would require a fair bit of work on SR's part since all the odds would have to be done via the site to maintain fairness. and the order/feedback system would need to be slightly modified for those tickets too.
xoxo
-mb
I totally agree with you but to be flippant for a second instead of making a note on your vendor page saying buyers must have xx amount of feedback make a note saying buyers must have competed $500 worth of sales or however much you feel proves their worth
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if those stats arent grooving with me then i'm cancelling. that includes lottery players with 80 transactions for a total of 200$ spent. that's clearly BS and i know it as such. i'm more interested in the buyer's AVERAGE price per transaction. that will paint me a "truer" picture of the buyer than simply total sales. IMHO, total sales is and always has been BS. AVG price is the way to go
I don't think you guys are getting it. That's how it used to be.
I made this thread because it's not like that anymore.
Now that same lottery player can get an account with 20 transactions and $2,000 dollars spent. You CANNOT tell the difference from buyer stats the way they are currently, that's the problem!
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if those stats arent grooving with me then i'm cancelling. that includes lottery players with 80 transactions for a total of 200$ spent. that's clearly BS and i know it as such. i'm more interested in the buyer's AVERAGE price per transaction. that will paint me a "truer" picture of the buyer than simply total sales. IMHO, total sales is and always has been BS. AVG price is the way to go
I don't think you guys are getting it. That's how it used to be.
I made this thread because it's not like that anymore.
Now that same lottery player can get an account with 20 transactions and $2,000 dollars spent. You CANNOT tell the difference from buyer stats the way they are currently, that's the problem!
hi hi
ooooooooooooOOOOh i see now.
it just hit me after re-reading your OP.
in light of this, currently, i think the only way we could really tell is by the age of the buys... the lottery craze seems to be a new thing on the road in the past few months.
what do you guys think of having SR show us the buyer's transaction history for the names of all the items they purchased and the timestamps? kind of like the Account history list?
i hadnt realized people were putting up lottos for BTC like satoshi dice crap. maybe we should report those vendors - is this technically even against the rules? i dunno, this is a pretty complex issue now that i think of it.... think we should all brainstorm how to fix this....
xoxo
-mb
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what do you guys think of having SR show us the buyer's transaction history for the names of all the items they purchased and the timestamps? kind of like the Account history list?
That would be great...
........To help law enforcement with their investigations. ::)
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what do you guys think of having SR show us the buyer's transaction history for the names of all the items they purchased and the timestamps? kind of like the Account history list?
That would be great...
........To help law enforcement with their investigations. ::)
D'OH!
feel like homer simpson right now... *facepalm*
ok scratch that idea lol
xoxo
-mb