Classifieds & Scams from Africa

[jorn ake]

I understand the restriction re: posting For Sale items in the

individual forums, but I am getting scams in response to my postings

in the classifieds now. People from Benin want to send me a gadzillion

dollars for my cameras and then pass the difference in cash off to

some uncle brother cousin. I told them to ask the FBI for permission

first. Photo.net needs to put a 20 second delay on the seller's email

in those postings or only make the email available to members or keep

all questions and contacts on the site. Something. I know others have

gotten this scam too. Sure I know this sort of thing happens. I am not

totally clueless. But why help them out?

[mottershead]

It is hard to know what to do about this. Requiring a photo.net membership to get the advertiser's address would only slow them while they registered under a hotmail, yahoo, etc email address.

 

Clearly, anybody placing an ad in the classifieds has to be contactable and unfortunately, not everybody who presents himself as a buyer is trustworthy. I don't know how we could fix this other than to run the classifieds only for photo.net subscribers (or perhaps people who had at least been registered members for some minimum amount of time). That would make it safer to buy and sell there, but I suspect that the number of classifieds would drop from the current 40 to 50 per day, to many less, and most of the people no longer participating would be legitimate.

[bob_lazzarini]

Brian,<p>

Just a humble suggestion...<br><br>

Restrict access to any selling and buying only to photo.net subscribers:<br>

1. who've been paid members for at least 30 days, and<br>

2. who've demonstrated that they can be useful members by contributing help, advice, etc. to photo.net.<br><br>

At very least it would keep out <i>"questionable"</i> individuals who come here to glean email addresses for their scams, or those who register only to buy or sell and not provide anything else to this site.<br>

If they want to use photo.net as their personal *bay, at very least get them to pay for the consideration.<p>

Cheers!

[Ian Taylor]

Why allow free classifieds in the first place? They are a huge source of regular income for almost every newspaper on the planet. Even if you lost 80% of the ads, you would gain revenue and get rid of the rip-offs in one move.

[bdpics]

I've yet to see a photography forum that charged for classified ads, rather it's a service offered as a courtesy to members.

 

I do wholeheartedly agree that ONLY paid members should be allowed to post items for sale in the classifieds, and maybe restrict contacting the seller to paid members only as well. This would stop most, if not all of the scams, and provide yet another incentive to pay the Pnet membership fee.

 

FWIW, I was scanning the classfieds on another photo forum, and spotted a killer deal on a used lens. The catch was that only paid members could respond to the classifieds, I quickly paid my $25 membership fee, bought the lens, and was still $400 ahead.......

[dan flanders]

I don't use the classifieds for the very reason that there is too much chaff obscuring the wheat. On the other hand a FS or T notice in the forums seems to be a much more reliable and effective means to promote trade. I wish it were not discouraged. Restrict classified ad use to paid up members only and you will cure a significant part of the problem. Scamming, spamming, identity theft, and other unsavory practices are on the rise and it behoves responsible venues to make their facilities less attractive to the malefactors.

[mottershead]

Since we don't make any money from the classifieds, it might be worth a try.

[ben maddox]

I can understand making non-members pay. But i'm not so sure how well it would go over with the current members. Thats part of what some people joined for in the first place.

[bobatkins]

I think restricting ads only to subscribers would increase security, but at the cost of greating reducing the number and variety of items offered for sale. That would not be good.

 

Restricting buying and selling to registered users would be better than nothing, though registration is so easy that it's not much of a barrier to anyone out to work a scam. Still, any barrier is better than no barrier at all.

 

A third alternative might be to allow only contact via photo.net and to tag email forwarded from non-registered (or non-subscribing) users (or even all users) with a message warning about scams and directing the recipient to read the article http://www.photo.net/equipment/caveat_emptor.html which provides some advice on how to identify and avoid scams.

[mottershead]

Several of the people who have been sending these messages are in fact registered photo.net members, although generally they are very new photo.net members. While they fairly quickly become ex-photo.net members, courtesy of the moderators, that doesn't really stop them from creating a new hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc "identity" and trying again.

[douglas_green1]

IMHO, as someone who has advertised a camera on Photo.net, and received both scam offers and legitimate offers for it (one of which I gladly accepted, was paid, sold the camera, and received notice that the buyer was happy), it's my take that cutting down access will do more harm than good to the legitimate commerce between buyers and sellers. It's a mean world out there, but all of us have to live in it. The best we can do is set up the environment to more easily allow us all to do so.

 

What I would propose is simply this: 1) Keep the classifieds open to any interested buyer, but require sellers to be photo.net members.

 

2) Set up one specific, clearly labeled and archived forum JUST for people to report scams. Don't cycle them out, just keep them available for all to see as a warning database. For me, when I received the scam offer, I was able to quickly discern that it was a scam, but I was not certain as to where the best place to post a warning to others within photo.net so that they would be alerted to it. I don't think reducing access and interaction between buyers and sellers is helpful at all - but providing access to the information about these scams is certainly helpful, and it's really all that Photo.net could be expected to do. The rest lies in each of our own hands.

[bdpics]

I disagree with Douglas's post above.

 

Most of the scams are now coming from the buyers, not the sellers. Yes, the sellers could be scamers, but I personally would not buy from any seller on Pnet that did not have a lengthy history here and/or a good feedback rating at "Feebay" etc., and so newly registered sellers wouldn't get much action until they had a postive track-record, which of course is a no-go for scammers looking for the quick buck--that's why almost all the scams are from buyers.

 

The main problem is scams and how to avoid them. By only allowing members to buy, the scams are all but elimated AND there's an extra incentive to pay your membership fee. I'd also limit selling to members only (and keep the service free for members!) again as an incentive to buy a membership and to reduce scams.

 

Yes, intitially there would be a drop in the number of classified listings as the freeloaders were forced out, but I'd venture that the decline would be short-lived as it still remains a FREE (i.e. no additional fee beyond membership) way to buy and sell quality used equipment and once the membership numbers are up around 25,000 or so, that's potentially a LOT of used gear.......