In regards to Runescape account sales

I have been heavily browsing the scammer reports section recently after almost falling into a $800 scam from a ban evading/known scammer.

Something that has caught my attention recently which is occurring WAY TOO OFTEN is scam reports being filed as a result of an account sale dispute.

Account sales are simply not safe and it is just impossible to establish who should hold liability when the buyer incurs a loss due to the account being 'hacked/recovered/etc..'.

For example:
Buyer is denied access to the account due to invalid password. Proceeds to open scam report.
Seller responds to scam report & agrees to assist buyer in recovery efforts.
Seller successfully recovers account and returns to buyer.
Buyer states 200m is missing in whatever form it may be.

This is where it gets real iffy.. There is NO way to prove that the seller was indeed the one who stole said items & now that the burden of recovering the account is lifted from the seller is it simply put that the buyer is out 200m and should 'live with it'? Even IF the seller provided legitimate recovery information which was "tested blah blah blah" a seller can always claim the the info was leaked therefore he has no liability in this matter blah blah blah.

Seller claims no liability & since he has assisted in the recovery of the account, report closed.

There seriously needs to be some new & stricter regulations implemented in regards to Runescape account sales; specifically who can and cannot sell accounts. I have seen multiple scam reports pertaining to similar matters just today and yesterday.

@Sythe @Chloe

 

I agree with you, account sales can be difficult. But limiting who can sell accounts would go against our idea of a free market. People chose who they buy of, they understand that there is an elevated level of risk of recovery when buying from someone who has little/ no rep. We can only educate people on the risks of buying accounts and the ways in which they can stay as safe as possible. No support if you're wanting a rule that in any way hinders the sales of accounts for "trusted" or "untrusted users".

 

Verified account seller rank/mini always something I've been fairly supportive of, I'm all for free market but honestly the complaints get tiring about account sales.

It's a shitty market with a lot of shitty people.

Any and every idea has been shot down because it involves giving certain sellers advantages in terms of a rank or something else over other sellers.

It's a never ending wheel of clusterfuck.

U either violate the free market and say "HEY IDIOTS THESE ARE THE GUYS TO TRADE AS THEIR VERIFIED" or you don't say anything and u get 500 suggestions and scam reports and headaches.

I mean it's a lose-lose, u either give the middle finger to the free market or u give the middle finger to everyone getting scammed.

If people wouldn't be flat stupid it wouldn't be a problem, but after 2 years nothings changed.

I'm supporting, I'm honestly tired of the complaints, I'm a huge advocate of free market but its like every day people are being scammed.

Add a verified seller rank for accounts or some shit and get it done with.

 

You can trade mini ranks.

That's what we have vouches for.

No.

 

It's just absurd. A verified seller rank for accounts is exactly what is needed at this point. By intruding on Sythe's philosophy of a free market we would be doing the true & honest traders a favor and sending a big fuck you to the ones who plan to recover an account.

We just see what is reported, I'm willing to bet 80% of accounts if not more get recovered after a short period of time. A lot of people say fuck this board because of said scenario in post #1.

 

And when these "verified" sellers decided to scam quit? A rank means nothing. This is a grey area that will always be risky for any buyer.

 

What? This is simply irrelevant to the topic.

And when these "OMM" would like to pull off a big exit scam and decide to scam quit? There's a grey area for risk in ANY market, but that does not mean we should ignore ways to minimize risk. It's a simple concept.

 

That first part was a response to Bus, I didn't tag him, sorry about that.

And that's what I'm saying, anybody who decides to scam is going to do it, no matter what title they have, how much they've donated, etc. Obviously it would be ignorant to scam a Rs account when you have much more to lose. I'm all for safety also but these suggestions just don't seem like they'll prevent anything.

EDIT: I called you Gus, Bus. Oops. "Gus Bus" lol

 

You're basically saying fuck the small people as you're comparing the rank to an omm which is very difficult to achieve. Who are we going to give this verified rank to? Big gold sites who charge over the odds for accounts, and still do have issues with the accounts. We'll actually be lowering traffic as loads of people come to sythe to buy accounts, when they see these "extremely high" prices or none that they like they'll simply go else where.

 

It's well advertised that accounts are always recoverable, I don't think we should have restrictions on who can and can't sell accounts, everyone has the choice of who to buy an account from if they buy one.

 

I'm going to point out some of the things I've observed through my time selling accounts here. It might seem nice to have a trusted/verified users list for accounts but that's not practical or feasible.

1. Everyone knows the risks of account buying. I get people messaging me to mm account trades and I just tell them no and to be careful because the seller can recover the account at any time. Every single reply is just "oh well I trust him blah blah we had a good skype talk". This brings me to my next observation.

2. Untrusted people have the nicest accounts. Some of the most sought after accounts, maxed 1 def pures, etc. are sold by people with absolutely no reputation. If you're looking for an account like that, 99 times out of 100 you're going to have to buy from someone with no rep.

3. Buyers very easily get hooked on accounts and then convince themselves the seller is trusted. Imagine you're new to the site and you're looking for a 1 defense pure. You're going to look in the section and of course you're going to look for people with higher trust levels. Very quickly you'll discover that they don't really exist for the account you want but that doesn't make you want the account any less. So you start looking at all of the untrusted people selling because those are your only options and you find an account that meets what you want. Now you're almost certainly going to get scammed but how else are you going to buy the account you want? People would rather "take a chance" and buy the account they want from someone with no rep than not buy the account at all because no seller is trusted.

Now it's terrible seeing people get scammed but we do have to give people the option to buy and sell freely. If we restrict the market to trusted sellers only, it's going to be quite the barren market. The plus side is that there would be next to no scams but as I've observed people are knowingly accepting the scam risks anyway. These are all conscientious decisions. As for the OP, wealth on the account that gets lost can't be proved at all and so to avoid buyers framing their sellers, the seller is just not liable for any wealth lost (more reason not to buy from untrusted people)

 

I have to agree with this, it's just a fucked up system that will never be fixed unless Jagex implements some other security measures that will permanently secure an account with the new owner, which will never ever happen. You can close this.

 

I’m not denying that account sales are very risky. But limiting them here will just send more traffic to places like Playerauctions. At least if someone gets scammed here there is a pardon process which may lead to them being reimbursed some of their losses.

 

Limiting the risk would be difficult, but this could help.

• Only allow accounts to be sold by their original owner. If it is found that the seller is not the original owner it should be seen as them scamming and they should be banned.

 

How do you plan on regulating the account sales, anyways? Using a verified seller rank isn't the way to go.

That's just like limiting payment methods (see previous suggestion about disallowing Vemno as a payment method). Sythe is a free market, which means they don't restrict people or "discriminate" by trustworthiness. It boils down to this:

Restricting some members in what items and products they sell, we start eliminating members and revenue towards the site. Members are (or should be) well aware of the risks account trading comes with. Unfortunately, there is no way to truly prevent members from recovering their account or scamming, so all we can really do is give warning about the sales.

 

The greatest account I've ever bought was 2480 total level on rs3 and I bought it from a guy with zero vouches. I did my research and he said he hadn't played in a very long time. Figured he might as well sell it. I looked into the account and it hadn't been played on in a year and a half. I've had no issues with it lol and he had zero vouches. I bought another account from playerauctions from a seller with 25 acount sales and it was recovered 2 months later. You really can't know lol its all about is it worth the risk to you. And can you afford to loose what u spend. Ive bought over 10 acounts and learmed quickly to just treat them as a gamble lol.

 

You're just going to have to live with it, like the rest of us. I've been scammed for a lot of gp through accounts being recovered from me, including from people that had lots of vouches. Sythe would obviously never restrict who can sell accounts because that just limits activity on the website whilst still not guaranteeing safety regarding account sales.

Look on the bright side, at least it's pretty easy to prove scams regarding account sales. It could be worse, like the names market.

 

Or what we could implement is some specific people in the community to monitor scam reports as the average global mod or market mod doesn't seem to handle these reports sufficiently.

Look at this fuckery: Reporting Phatalize
The only way Phatalize is not able to recover the account is because:
1. He is NOT the original owner
2. He is the original owner and recovered the account himself & changed the e-mail and is now playing dumb

Jagex runs a simple process for recoveries especially if you're recovering from a location where your ISP and IP address match where the account was played often. I am laughing at how the staff is handling this. If it were me I would lay the fucking ban hammer right on phatalize in a split second.

 

Do you work for Jagex why you know so much about their recovery system?

I understand your point. Its not professional if he cant recover the account for the first person that he sold it to, however depending on how he built the account he may need some additional info about the account from the buyer in order to recover it. A quick example is; if he only used bonds to train the account and didnt link a card to it, and now the buyer has linked a card to the rs account. Jagex will take that into consideration and if he is not able to provide the correct details for the card i can see why they will easily deny the request.

Also reading the posts to that topic, he doesn't want to attach himself to the resell of that account. Once an account has been in the possession of numerous users for a long period of time, i am sure they will all have enough info to recover the account. Hence it will always fall back on the Original Owner to fix whatever problems might happen down the line.

The user said that his account was hacked; the truth we will never know. He could be lying, Phatalize could of recovered it which i doubt, or it could of genuinely of been hacked. Because of this complication already, the account shouldn't even be resold with this attached to it. That is probably Phatalize wants to distance himself from the account, but since he is the original owner its a fucked up situation....