Silk Road forums

Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: ChillyP on March 03, 2012, 03:00 am

Title: Vendors: How to Completely Protect Yourself from Feedback Fraud
Post by: ChillyP on March 03, 2012, 03:00 am

This dawned on me the other day when I was thinking about some of the recent issues that have come up with the old feedback blackmail problem. While I don't think this is a practical solution, especially on a large scale, it's a surefire way to keep control over your feedback. Some people will not like this, they will cry it foul; my aim is merely to describe it and discuss possible implications rather than advocate or critcize it. I think the most beneficial outcome from vendors doing this is that it would spur admin to actually make meaningful changes to the feedback system that are long overdue.

It works like this. A buyer comes to you for a purchase. For whatever reason, you think they may be a scam buyer or they have really weak stats, or whatever. You cancel their order (if they've already placed one), and instruct them to create a new buyer account. Then, you have them transfer the bitcoins for the purchase to that account. They then give you the password and PIN for that account. You open it, change the password, and complete their order. Or you could just have a dedicated account which they transfer bitcoins into, and then you just purchase through that account. SR still gets the commission and it's not terribly different from finalizing early, except the feedback is under your control. Ideally you would fill it in with whatever the buyer wanted you to.

Of course the potential for abuse on the vendor part is huge, and the buyer doesn't get the advantage of building up stats. On the other hand this could be useful for buyers to prove their credibility to vendors before they can make regular purchases. The 'friction' of having to do this regularly would be a pain in the ass, but sometimes peace of mind is worth it...just ask VMM.

This is obviously not a perfect solution by any means. It just exploits a loophole, but for now that's the only way to deal with this problem (that I can think of). It really is a shame that a few shithead buyers make us vendors consider stuff like this, but that's life I suppose. Credibility is everything here and it sucks that some complete nobody can try to scam you out of an order or blackmail you with a bad rating.
Title: Re: Vendors: How to Completely Protect Yourself from Feedback Fraud
Post by: microRNA on March 03, 2012, 12:04 pm
This is actually a kind of interesting idea actually. I think the problem may be also that it is generally hard to predict which buyers will eventually cause an issue. Most of the stories of people complaining about bad product and coming to the forum or leaving bad feedback involved buyers with multiple transaction and without overly negative stats.