Venezuelans and gold selling

Situation: So I had a Venezuelan worker just complete some work and he asked me to pay him out. He asked me to pay him in 07 and not in BTC because he doesn't own a wallet. I checked at Yanlili, Alch and some other guys who roughly gave me .46 as their buying rate. So I converted what was due in dollars to 07 (using .46) and paid my buddy out.
Sometime later my buddy told me he would gladly do some more work, but he felt that I paid him less than what was due. He told me that he was selling his gold to a Venezuelan flipping website for like .40.
He linked me to this website and I asked another Venezuelan friend of mine to visit that website and ask for their buying rate. They also offered him some rate that is substantially below market. I then visited the website myself and found them offering me .43 (obviously seeing that I have a European IP).

I told the guy who did some work for me that he is much better off selling to someone big with an established reputation all over the internet, who also provides Ven bank. I gave him a number of suggestions (Alch etc.). He told me that he never heard of these and heard that neither of these provide Ven bank.

Don't get me wrong, I'm the guy who had the Trump avatar, but please hear me out:
Yes, I am all for the market doing its own work, but right now, there are Venezuelans who barely speak any English, most without a degree who are trying to make their living playing video games.
Then, apparently, there are also these Venezuelan websites who prey on these guys and make money off these guys by preying on their lack of knowledge (of the English language), fear to get scammed, abusing the fact that there is a language barrier when Venezuelans deal with non-Venezuelan websites and that most gold buying advertisement is directed at English-speaking people.
I believe that everyone is entitled to have their own business model. Sure, if these Venezuelan websites wanna make their buck flipping money from Venezuelans (at a normal rate), that is their thing. Supply and demand right.
However, given the context of the situation: 1. who the guys are who sell to these websites; 2. the ridiculous rates that they offer, I believe it is far from a stretch to say that these websites are establishing themselves as the sole buyers for a large group of Venezuelans (mostly over Facebook) and abusing the disparity by giving extremely low rates.
I not only believe that it is our duty as a community to do something about this, but it is also in the interest of having a healthy market to tackle this.

Do I have a concrete suggestion to deal with this? Unfortunately, I do not. As seen in other threads, usually great suggestions tend to come up deeper within threads. By creating this thread I hope that the community recognizes this unethical market behavior and that it comes up with good suggestions so that we can all benefit. In the end, a healthy market is more beneficial to everyone.

 

What is your suggestion, I am not seeing one.

 

Don't have a concrete suggestion. As mentioned, mainly looking for input and wanted to raise this matter as I believe it's worth doing so. .46 → .39 is almost 25% of the income so it's a pretty big deal.

But because you asked the questions for the sake of asking the question: Maybe naming and shaming these businesses? Or posting a sticky somewhere of trusted flippers who offer Ven bank? I don't think either of these suggestions is particularly good but, again, my aim was mainly to raise this matter and have others do the suggestion as I'm not particularly the creative type.

Also, some other people on discord are underlining this issue:



Feel free to add anything if you have something constructive

 

I asked, because I didn't see a suggestion. This is a free market. Naming and shaming isn't "constructive". If anything, it's destructive. A sticky perhaps but then you're vouching for someone and I doubt Sythe would do that. If vennies are getting taken advantage of, cest le vie. Use a google translator, learn english if you want to be apart of the english speaking market. Someone in the past suggested a vennie only section of the website which I could see the benefits for, maybe. I would like to hear the inputs of actual vennies who this affects to see if it is something that is really needed.

Other than that, not sure. I hope this was "constructive" enough for you.

 

Agree on one thing. Naming and shaming is destructive. To the ones undercutting and scamming, yeah.

As to your 'just don't be dumb lolz' line, well unfortunately some people aren't the brightest and they don't have an education. There's 50 year olds who barely touched a computer doing osrs work right now. Saying they should be able to google translate 'or lolz' then just straight-up becomes victim-blaming. So no, you're not constructive to answer your question.

 

no support for this idea at all regardless of what the suggestion ends up being. it's pretty ironic that you are suggesting this because I seem to recall most of your ideas tend to float round the idea of the free market and business doing whatever is within their rights and letting the market sort it out.

there are plenty of flippers and businesses who offer higher selling prices than what you might consider fair, or lower buying prices. All of these business exist in different niches and those niches as well as their advertising schemas and formats offer them different client populations who will buy and sell for different rates. It's easy for you to say they are getting taken advantage of because you don't like the low rate, but the business offer services that are favorable to that customer population and that allows them to set the prices they would like to use. In this instance South American sites can offer many things like an entire list of payment options that can be quite difficult to get access to otherwise. There are like 10+ payment options that are popular across south america and many require having a bank within a given country to be able to send the bank transfer. ALl the staff probably speak spanish, and many of the ven business have special methods for preventing bans despite venezula being an extremely 'hot' area in terms of bans on their IP's

It seems like you are equating lower buying prices to being sketchy or untrustworthy in your comment to make a list of 'trusted flippers' who offer ven bank options.

This is just the same as the fact that many US sellers charge higher prices to buy via payment methods like cashapp and zelle as opposed to crypto, because it's convenient for customers to use these payments and they would rather pay more than figure out another option.

In reality so many people could get better prices if they did some more research but they are paying for convenience and ease of access. To try and blacklist business offering convenience to customers just because you don't like their prices seems silly. I'm sure there is still competition between ven gold buying services it's just a lower market standard, as far as prices, in general. There are a number of flippers who simply buy from Venezuelans all day then come dump to sythe resellers at the end of each day. These are venezualans who have figured out and done research about how to sell at a higher price using different methods than what's easiest and that's why they occupy this position. All the venezualans could do this if they desired but they might be focusing on something else like the most effective way to farm their gold rather than the most effective way to sell it. Just so many things wrong with this idea in terms of the free market

 

This is a free market, sir. Although, if a scam occurs, feel free to make a report in the correct section.

 

your description of the events doesn't seem to list scamming anywhere but then you're talking about sketchy behavior scamming and trustworthiness. It's not even as if there is one large venezualan site that is a monopoly and there are no others. It is an open market with tons of buyers to choose from and they all probably are competitive within the market by offering competetive pricing for THAT MARKET. You also talk about the language barrier as if the companies are taking advantage of it. Language barriers are a thing and you can't just get rid of them, they offer services in a language the customers know and speak. All the reasons you listed for why they sell gold to those sites, seem like the same reasons americans buy gold at very high rates from sites here. Fear of being scammed ( ie using a site they trust ) language barrier ( ie they can't buy direct from venezualans if they don't speak spanish) and lack of knowldge ( ie customer doesn't want to spend time reserching best rate or isnt' aware of other sellers)

 

I do believe in the free market. I am not saying "instill rule X or Y to deal with this problem", but I'm fishing for suggestions. I'm not defending my own suggestions either, I just named them for the sake of naming suggestions and this thread being a valid thread that belongs to this section. But obviously if you're going to come with suggestion my heart will lean more towards creating more awareness / warning people. That's for your and Devil's free-market point

Most buyers have Spanish-speaking workers and various methods of paying Venezuelans. So that's not mutually exclusive if you're comparing non-Vennie business to Vennie business

As for the idea that Venezuelans just have access to this hypercompetitive market and it's their choice not to participate: Don't agree with that notion at all. Most Venezuelans don't even speak English, let alone know Sythe. The Venezuelans you're seeing are most likely less than 50% of the Venezuelans performing the actual labor. So the point you're making about Venezuelans being able to compete is irrelevant, because the market isn't as accessible to them as it is to you and me (with all the barriers). Furthermore, the relation between them and websites is literally comparable to B2C. Now, I'm opposed to instilling rules to deal with this vertical relation (because as you said it so smoothly 'hur-dur free-market', instead I wanna focus on what else we can do, as a community.

Anyway, if you don't believe this is a problem, I'm getting a shitton of situations/scenarios DM'd which I could happily forward to you as well if you're interested

That's not the point. To you and me there is no monopoly, sure. But to the venezuelan who comes from Facebook and has never heard about Sythe and just knows this one website to sell gold to, there is

 

Venezuelans as a population might not have the largest access to sythe and it probably is the minority who can speak english and figure out the market that are here participating. but you're portraying a scenario where if you can't get on sythe there is no market, and only some unfair monopoly. There are RS markets in probably every different language where demand for RS gold exists. To say that there is a monopoly because someone saw a gold site on facebook and never used another one is ridiculous. Sure probemas runs a ton of ads and if you see one and then only use probemas you'll get bad rates compared to the average market price, but that doesn't mean it's a monopoly just because you saw on ad and decided to look no further. While I can't give specefic examples because i'm not in the VEN marketplace, I can promise there are tons of options for different sites and buyers who will buy VEN gold. Just from being in the gold market I know at least 10 different people or entities that buy gold from Venezuelans and offer all the niche conveniences Venezuelan people need. So I don't know why you would think there is only one or even only two or even only a handful of people controlling the Venezuelan gold buying service.

I think that if you think your workers are getting 'ripped off' you should probably help recommend them some sites that offer better pricing. But from what I can see in your post when your worker told you the price he had to sell at you recommended him a bunch of sites and services not tailored to VEN that don't offer the proper payment methods. So what you should do is maybe compile a list of sites that actually offer the service your workers need and then pick the one with the best pricing and promote that one or tell them about it.

If we let you make the list of VEN sites to buy from just based on what services have the most overal competetive pricing then you'll have yanlili (who you specefically referenced), who is based in china and has no VEN payment options sending 3rd party paypal payments from their customers joe scmoe to your peruvian/Ven/etc workers and telling them in english that it's all going to work out
( no offense meant to yanlili this last line is exaggerated for humor)

 

This sounds more like an issue of rendering payment to your workers. The way you worded your post it sounds like you're paying them a flat $ rate, but never checked to make sure you could pay them. It sounds more like you're being charged a 25% fee because you never specified how you would get them payment and you're passing the cost on to them. That's why most servers end up charging their customers OSRS GP and pay their workers in OSRS GP (minus the server cut) to not cause this issue, and so the workers can figure out what they're going to be paid. If we're going to create a list of websites that are good for workers to sell their gold to, should we also create a list of employers that aren't able to pay via certain methods so that workers know to stay away from working for them?

 

@President , the reason they offer .40/m to Venezuelan is because of the fee you gotta convert zelle-physical cash-sell the physical cash for BSS(venezuelan money) and that cost a lot in fee. for my case I sell $1 for zelle or btc and the person that get it charge between 3-5%. and then to convert that dollar into Venezuelan money they take another 6-10%. now do the math and you will know why they offer that rate to them.... but I have others cases where they sell me gold via BTC and I pay them fully at the market price and I still make some profit.

I understand a lot of people exploit them and trust me I not one of them but when it comes about gold sales you can't expect people to be fair... I run a services with over 28 services provider now and I pay them %% not $30-$40 like most provider do. each of my worker make at least $200-$300 monthly when they do services. but when is about gold sale they gotta expect this.

I used to pay them .44/m in Venezuelan money but then I notice I wasn't making a cent profit and I had to figured out the cause so yeah you end losing about 15%-20% in fee.... if you want some information just message me in discord

the only thing I agree with you is about people exploiting them for services with is sad and fucked up.... but about gold sale is better if you get to know the whole thing first. I lost near $200 when I entered this market for buying their gold and trust me so far no one can beat my price in their market since I am paying the best I can

you gotta keep in mind that one dollar is near 3M in venezuelan money and that 3M next week doesn't cost $1 but probably like 70cents.

 

Ultimately this entire post is one big circle-jerk as there's not really a realistic solution to the problem you're providing.
As others have pointed out, it's a free market and the prices companies provide is their prerogative.
Even if there were some sort of standardized pricing, the issue then becomes like you said, it costs money to be able to get the money to that Venezuelan (through exchange rates and such)

This isn't just a problem for Venezuela, even as a Canadian, if I get money sent to me on PayPal, if it's sent in CAD, I get completely shafted because PayPal just makes up their own exchange rates. The same is said for just about any payment processor that's converting your cash from USD to CAD, as they all set their own exchange rates, and they want to get paid too.

At the end of the day the beauty of the free market is that you have the freedom to do your research and determine the best person/company to give your business. If your workers aren't doing that research, that's on them; and if they're getting their best dollar from these guys, and 0.40/m is just a normal rate after the cost of converting the currencies, then it's on them to KNOW that they'll be incurring those costs, and to adjust the prices they're giving to you for the jobs accordingly.

 

Also, the competition is hard and some gold seller are afraid of competition since they don't have a solid foundation. for example there are few that are scared of me I wont tell names but @SUPERGOLDVE can be a example. for example, since I give the best price this guy been paying clans to ban me or my manager from their discord since his scared