[Official] Changes to Account Trade on PlayerAuctions

Hi All,

I have been away for the past two months from Sythe, and have quite a lot of catching up to do. However on thread caught my attention: http://www.sythe.org/market-discussion/1841642-playerauctions-running-scam.html

Our risk management team has investigated those orders (and the relevant members in that thread will be contacted directly) and was able to find some items that need to be addressed to improve account trades for RS.

First, some general metrics:

1. Right now, PA secures around 1,500 + in account trades each month only for Runescape Markets.
2. Of those trades, around 5% are reported as reclaimed on a monthly average.
3. This is "high" by PA standards, where most games experience at most a 1% reclamation rate.
4. The rate has risen to 7 percent last month, which is above our normal standard deviations for this market. (and if you recall a 10% margin for PA, this is obviously not acceptable to our ability to sustain).

The assessment
Given the thread above, I've had our risk management team look into the claims, and have found validity in some of the OP's assertions (namely, a scammer re-posting for sale offers).

This seller (and several others) have been permanently suspended from the site. But more importantly, we discovered the loophole they were using in order to re-list scammed accounts which was allowing them to bypass our auto-fraud filters.

The change we are making to the backend is significant, and -may- impact future orders (i.e. make it more difficult to sell) so please be forewarned. That being said, we would appreciate your input, as we will be moving forward on making adjustments to the risk rules to make sure that "honest traders" remain as little impacted as possible.

Over the next month, we will be monitoring the account trade situation on PA to see if this change reduces the abuse of repeat offenders.

If it doesn't, then there is a phase 2 in place which I can disclose at a later time.

Additionally, the other thread highlight certain stand procedures with our CS team which ultimately prevented the right teams from being apprised of the issues members were reporting, and as such we are rolling out new SOP's to make sure that product department is apprised of "member reports on scams".

Others Affected
If you were affected by the "multi-listing" scam mentioned in the above thread, please place -ONLY- your order ID's in this thread (no commentary plz) and I will contact you directly to get it resolved (even if you didn't purchase insurance, we will bite the bullet for this one).

Thanks!
Jacob A.
Head of Western Marketplaces

 

Thanks for clearing this issue.

 

Nice of you to compensate the victims, whether they had insurance or not.

On a side-note, you should 2FA your Sythe account.

 

There is no way he'd get hacked, he manages playerauctions.com. People of these standards aren't fools.

 

It's never a bad idea to apply 2FA. Even if his password is unique, it doesn't fully protect his account from unauthorized access.

On topic, nice to see some steps in the right direction.

 

Excellent news Jacob, I'm always impressed by the dedication and effort you put into addressing threads on this site and we all appreciate it

 

Glad to see you taking action

 

Sounds good. Cheers!