Market manipulation appeal.

Dear Mods/Admings,

I've been banned for market manipulation seen in this thread : http://www.sythe.org/report-scammer/1827812-market-manipulation-rsgoldmarkt-suspicion.html

The reason there are so many replies thanking Linked is because linked has been and is a live chat agent on my site now for atleast some months doing afternoon time, so obviously alot of people talk to him on live chat. To think that fastrsgold.com (Linked his site) was made just so our site (runescapegoldmarkt.com) would get more bumps is insane beyond belief (seeing as how Linked already had his site created around the same time as mine but only started using it some time ago. Both sites made by DDIS group who host atleast 10 RS gold sites). His package costs around 100$ a month so i hardly believe he will pay 100$ per month just so i can get more vouches on my threads. Linked is even mentioned in my sig as one of my live chat agents. So having people mention his name in my vouches is pretty obvious seeing as how he works in my live chat aswell as does live chat work on his own website. The vouches placed on my topics were related to orders placed on my website and not on Linked's site. Yes i know we get the occasional ''wrong vouch" on our threads for example when people sell us gold instead of buying from us and yes we know that vouches get misplaced at times. But which seller doesn't have that happen once in a while? I already was told by a mod to keep the buying and selling bumps separated and trust me when i say i'm trying the best i can to do so.

 

I will avoid going into immense detail on your ban reason, since we have spoken about it with you privately. You are not banned for employing Linked, you are banned for self/fake vouching.

 

Sorry, disregard the OP then please. I posted that before i talked to R2 on skype about the actual reason for my bann. So i thought it had something to do with Linked working for me. Like R2 told me on Skype, it does look very bad. And indeed granted, it really really does look bad. I already confirmed with R2 on skype that indeed the vouches are fake because indeed i can't find any details about them in my CMS panel or paypal/skrill account. But they weren't placed by myself or anyone on my team. Nor did i pay someone to place them for me. I have been friends with Mods and even an Admin on powerbot long enough to know that every mod can check not only IP's but also which browser the user used (including the current version), which user agent, which hostname and even the platform used to sign in. Ofcourse i have no actual details of the account info about the fake vouching accounts but i know for a 100% fact they can be linked all together in a matter of minutes. It would be beyond stupidity for me to donate 6000$ and then start pulling stunts that can obviously be checked pretty quickly with even the slightest of glimpse. Every one of my live chat agents knows i come online at 2-4PM my time, do some buy ins, collect my vouches on sythe once a day. Then head of again and come in to check from time to time if everything's ok. I do not do any live chat work myself anymore (or perhaps like 1-2 customers a week when no other agent is online which is very rare to say the least). Like i told R2, to think i would actually stay up to bump my thread constantly just so i can collect some vouches / get some bumps is crazy to believe. Like R2 replied i could have indeed paid someone to automate this process, but then again that would just be digging my own grave seeing as how i know what mods can check and what not. I'v always known there is literally no way on earth mods can't check everything. A VPN ip is spotted fairly easily with some resolving tools. Correct me if i'm wrong, some tools will even show the IP that was connected to the VPN ip at that time. If it is possible to check feel free to do so as i can assure you its not gonna be my ip that shows up, nor any agent of mine. Not that it matters much but i'm more than willing to give my Skype password to any mod/admin to check all my history dating back 6 months i believe. Heck i'll even buy an extra live chat agent spot if a mod/admin wants to check my logs if it will help proof my innocence. I already hinted towards the "conspiracy" theory with R2, seeing as how this incident began around the same time i started to have some serious beef with some other users on this forum. This is indeed a long stretch and indeed i know sounds a bit crazy. But would it be so weird to get me out of the game in such a way? R2 responded with the statement that it would seem unlikely seeing as how no one reported the incident. This all came to light accidentally. Indeed this is true but that doesn't mean a report wouldn't have followed some time after. If this was some sort of conspiracy plot it would just be an earlier death sentence for me seeing as how lalapo reported me for a whole different matter. R2 also pointed out that i'm responsible for my own service. I 100% agree on that and ofcourse punishments have to be made accordingly for my negligence towards my own service. I indeed collect vouches on sythe once a day. I don't check them for legitimacy because that would be insane amounts of work. We currently run 2 websites and get god knows how many orders each day and even more chats cause not every customers stays and buys something. Apparantly this incident started somewhere around beginning of March i believe according to R2. Our sales output for our English website has remained relatively the same february through april so far. So i had nothing more to gain having more vouches or not. Was i happy that i saw so many vouches each day when i was collecting them? Sure i was, but i thought it had something to do with my increased donor status. Being it so many different names (R2 said something about 20 names?) i didn't come to think of it they could be fake nor did i check sales records to check legitimacy (ofcourse i'm in fault there and should be punished for negligence). Each mod / person i have spoken to knows i'm not a fraudulent / black hat man. Even though being banned on sythe we still keep our big amounts of orders each day although i would like to return to Sythe obviously cause it still is the biggest black market with a fun community. I did not scam anyone nor ever plan to do so. Heck i don't even know how to put a VPS together. I have to ask people to do it for me. I do however have knowledge about what mods can check and what not being a very good friend of a powerbot admin (probably even my best friend on the internet). So i hardly see myself wanting to dig my own grave after donating 6K. Nor did i pay anyone or even talk to anyone regarding placing fake vouches for me. Feel free to check all skype logs if needed. If i can proof my innocence any other way please tell me how and i'll do it, cause i seriously have no idea how to proof i had nothing to do with the fake vouches other than the (long) statement i just made. Whichever the verdict is, i'll ofcourse have to be forced to accept. Not my forum so i don't make the rules. The people who have known me for a decent amount of time know i wouldn't do something as stupid as digging my own grave, stoop to black hat activities, have the knowledge to even pull something off like this, let alone have the time to do so. I even tried to place a bet on the 2 top Sythe banners showing i really was trying my best to somehow become a more active and more known trader on Sythe.org, showing furthermore i had no intent to dig my own grave.

Kind regards,

Kaii

 

You should have chats correlating to each vouch then, yeah?

 

@ Roary : Not really, seeing as how they are indeed fake. We have an automated message in our live chat to ask for vouches after every trade. We don't actually look if the vouches are placed or not. We just close the call and serve the next customer. I'm indeed negligent as to checking them for legitimacy. I just collected them once a day without looking up chat logs or any form of history. With all due respect towards sythe in general but i did not place those vouches on my threads, nor did anyone that is a live chat agent of mine. Nor did i pay/ask people to place them for me. I know it seems weird and definitely looks bad. And like i said it totally is my fault for not actually checking if the vouches were actually real. But not to toot my own horn i really don't have any need for the extra traffic. I'm also not a sales hungry guy, if i don't have enough stock i'll be one of the first people to direct a customer to another website if needed (obviously someone i like rather then dislike). I know there's probably a poll running in the staff lounge on how to deal with the situation, alot of it probably will be based on character (atleast i think seeing as how there will be no proof linking to me or anyone i know about the fake vouches and i really have no other way of showing i had nothing to do with it). I know from myself i'm not a black hat theorist or some market fraud, definitely not a sales hungry guy and mostly (if i'm not in a hurry) a general nice guy to talk to if you didn't kick me in my ass previously. I try to keep things as legit/honest as possible at all times, more than enough people will vouch for me on that. Indeed i know i'v had trouble adjusting to the 8 hour bump time on Sythe. Seeing as how i originally come from powerbot i'm kind of used to 3 hours. After many infractions i had a sit down with my staff explicitely telling them to watch the sythe bump time. Infractions or not that doesn't mean i would ruin my sythe reputation, and throw 6000$ in the trash for a stupid reason as fake vouching (which i know is indeed not one of the lightest offenses).

Kaii

 

He has 0 chats, he admits that nearly every single vouch on his thread since the middle of March is fake. His argument is that he did not create those vouches, that some random person has come along and vouched all of his threads daily for the past month. He says that both he and his agents somehow did not notice 100's of fake vouches on his threads. He implies that, in the past month, neither him nor his 5 workers have once looked at the vouches in his thread and realized they are all completely fake.

However, he did have time to go through the threads and copy many of those vouches into his vouch thread.

 

What follows is my personal opinion.

You could have caught this a long time ago. I looked at your threads after seeing a report on you and within a few minutes I knew something wasn't right. You had literally 30+ users who all joined within the last month posting repeatedly on your and ONLY your threads. Like r2p said, you took the time to quote all of these vouches as legitimate into your vouch thread, it would have taken you less time to actually realize that something was wrong when your threads suddenly went from being bumped 2-3 times a day to being bumped 5-8 times a day and from the same users no less. To say that you had no idea this was happening demonstrates an extreme lack of responsibility on your part and you should be punished for that. You benefitted by having your selling threads always on page 1 for more than a month and you padded your vouches too.

I have more that I'll add in after further conferring with other staff members

 

With all due respect, it's 30+ accounts now? Cause R2 was mentioning 20+. Like i told R2, untill this exact moment i myself don't even have a single clue as to how many vouches are fake and how many of them are real. R2 said something about it being around 300 vouches or so? On an estimate basis i think i was around 1100 vouches at the beginning of March or something? I had 1780 ish last time i checked. So that would mean that since the beginning of March, 300 were fake and 380 were real (1480 vouches in total being real and the rest being fake). And while i agree this is indeed an awful lot, an AWFUL lot. We can't be talking about "Almost all the vouches since March are fake". I did not confirm anything about all my vouches since March being fake. R2 gave me 2 sythe account names, i looked them up and indeed i couldn't find sales attached to them so i confirmed those 2 sythe accounts were indeed fake vouching accounts. Untill this time i still don't even have any knowledge as to which other accounts are fake. R2 did propose to give me a list but it really seemed irrelevant at the time to go through all my vouches to determine which ones were fake seeing as how i got banned at that time already.


As for the "But you did have time to collect the vouches" statement : Collecting vouches each day for the day that has past takes like what? 5-10 minutes or so? Collecting vouches is really not a time consuming job. I indeed confirm my negligence / extreme lack of responsibility towards the whole vouching ordeal and my overseeing my threads in general and for that i should be punished. But you have to understand, the more fake accounts we are talking about, the harder it is to actually spot anything suspicious from my side. The more haystacks you have the harder it is to find the needles. I'm not gonna read all the vouches over and over again from days that have past, notice "oh hmmm i'v seen that name before, that's pretty suspicious, let me see if this is actually a real trade or not" and then report accordingly.


People also have asked me "Your sales must have increased dramatically since this incident" which unfortunately for me is certainly not the case. My sales output has been going up ever since the beginning of February (fake vouches being placed started March according to R2) but that was because of the powerbot client ad i purchased and sales output has been relatively the same ever since and even the last 3 days (being banned for 3 days now) were the same salesoutput. Google statistics will happily show where most of my traffic comes from. Hence yet another reason i didn't expect my sales output to have anything to do with fake vouches. To be quite frank, i'v been a gold seller for quite sometime now and i realize all to well where the big bucks come from and it's not the threads on the forum itself but the banners that generate HUGE traffic. The views one thread gets in 6 months time is something a banner will generate in a month easily. Also hence why i placed a bid for the top banner at the last bidding. Richard obviously being a generious person (deff not sucking up, cause its just stating facts) decided to give the banner spot to food4rs even though i bidded more. Please also do keep in mind that i don't have 1 website but 2 (my dutch one bringing in more income than my english one and hence taking up more time and work) and we recently started doing trades for another website aswell so count it all up and with the little time i am online as it is, it really gives me no space to start checking every little detail and every vouch/feedback we get cause also sythe.org isn't the only forum we use. Returning now to the point where i'm at fault. Obviously, expanding takes up alot of energy. And like you said, if i can't oversee every part of my service (especially already knowing upfront that i didn't have alot of time on my hands to begin with) then i probably should not expand at all. Which is 100% my fault and shows a complete lack of care and responsibility for my service in total so yes i should be punished. But no, i did not have anything to do with the fake vouching and that's the gods honest truth.

 

First of all it should be known that I’ve done livechat work for kaii (rsgoldmarkt) for the past 2-3 months. Thus I am potentially biased & definitely influenced by that. Also this is simply my view of the situation (that I’m somewhat involved in but not really, unless of course you guys think that I was in on this and that I also need to prove my own innocence). I’ll be listing them all as separate points so that it’s easier to respond to any of the points that you guys wish to (and I can then expand on my thoughts on that specific matter).

1) The vouches were done incredibly sloppily. Looking over the situation, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the fake vouches at least somewhat credible (without getting too much into this for obvious reasons, swaps, with a few bond & small rwt trades (I’ll happily expand on this point to staff in private, or if you guys decide that it's fine for me to post on how to better do fake trades publicly though this isn't exactly an important thing to be expanded on anyways and I'm sure you guys can already think of ways)). If we were thinking so far ahead as to make them obviously fake in order to say that they’re obviously fake and that we’re being framed, a much better risk/reward ratio would come simply from having fake skype logs (at least with those vpn’d accounts that were constantly vouching us over and over) pretending to do the trades that I mentioned above instead and to also make them not look so obviously fake (again, not expanding on how specifically to do this publicly for obvious reasons, can be expanded on privately/publicly if staff desire that).

2) I think that a relatively fair resolution would be to have all vouches since the fakes started that we don’t explicitly prove as legit being wiped (up to us to go through all trades and link the vouches that shouldn’t be wiped (with proof) with everything else being nuked), us not being able to receive vouches bumping our threads for as long as the fake vouches were occurring and finally being forced to keep a very keen eye on vouches going forward forever (higher level of expectation for us/kaii than others going forward)

3) This isn’t nearly as beneficial nor all-encompassing as some think it is (“basically stickied” It’s definitely akin to that but not at all equivalent, I can expand on this if any staff members currently disagree with this point. “0 chats, he admits that nearly every single vouch on his thread since the middle of March is fake” That’s not true and kaii never said that it was. Since mid march kaii’s english site has had well over 1,000+ legitimate and provable trades (1,645 before counting out refunded, rejected & orders not on his English site)+his skype trades (which he’s stated he can give full access to in order to audit if you guys believe any of those might be fake)+alex’s skype (who does almost 100% of the swapping) + his dutch site. Ron (mmorpg) can verify the exact # of trades completed on his English site since mid march and the fact that the payments went through.
Here’s 10 trades (full uncensored version & corresponding order (receipt along with other info) through ron’s system can be provided for all of these to any staff member) that most likely resulted in us receiving a sythe vouch, within the time period of the fake vouches:
http://i.imgur.com/f0QE4Cl.png
http://i.imgur.com/sduHbUu.png
http://i.imgur.com/9QKfyJF.png
http://i.imgur.com/98eX8fy.png
http://i.imgur.com/XvYhHxw.png
http://i.imgur.com/meCCSmL.png
http://i.imgur.com/maLUSb2.png
http://i.imgur.com/Z4AoWom.png
http://i.imgur.com/rz5bndr.png
http://i.imgur.com/GQol9RQ.png
That’s not a lot of trades but it does help back up my point of the sythe vouches not all having been fake (also why we weren't taken aback by actively being vouched. If this was on my own vouches thread that would ofcourse be different, but if you go through my own vouches I'm sure none of those will look like fakes)

4) Regardless of the outcome of this dispute, the practice of fake vouches for major trader could still be used as a weapon by shady traders that're looking to do be in the market for many years, in order to damage the reputation of other traders that they see as potential longtime competitors. I would recommend a system change that allows us to more easily identify people that're posting from a vpn (outside of asking a moderator to check it all or guesswork on an ip audit which wouldn't show which posts specifically were from a vpn, I've personally most likely logged into sythe on a vpn in the past but that doesn't mean that most of my posts were done via a vpn ip), at least on our own market threads more easily (e.g if a post was posted from a vpn it might have something added to it identifying it as having been done so)

5) Looking at how much effort some people put in for getting rid of competitors (e.g ddosing), it’s not at all a stretch to imagine that if another major trader was already involved in shady things then they would see this as a good thing to do (ranging from hard to nearly impossible to trace back to them, potentially get rid of us, potentially tarnish our reputation, and at the very least be a big nuisance and force us to not be able to receive vouches freely after it was revealed (hopefully this dispute will result in us merely receive the later ^). With the benefit of temporarily being bumped for a while on 1 site potentially tarnishing somebody who’d be major competition for years (kaii is clearly dedicated to trading and planning on doing this for years longer). Kaii has said a little otherwise (“This is indeed a long stretch and indeed i know sounds a bit crazy.”) but I definitely disagree with that statement of his, it’s neither a long stretch nor crazy, but infact plausible.

6) There is no doubt a clear benefit for competitors to try to harm our reputation. He is a big trader (pb, tribot, and osbot along with sythe & since he has a lot of workers doing trades for him that leaves him even more open for a framing like this) and has been so for a while prior to the fake vouches.

7) Regarding this “neither him nor his 5 workers have once looked at the vouches in his thread and realized they are all completely fake.” Yes, that is 100% correct. Of the workers for kaii, all but 1 of us can be considered as relatively experienced forum traders at this point and yet none of us noticed that we were being fake vouched (it simply hadn’t occurred to us to be watching out for that). So, how can we prove that we weren’t also in on this? Well, that’s pretty hard to prove... I have my own rep and trading history outside of working for kaii, my first vouch alone on here (by ron (mmorpg) 2 years ago should say a good amount about me having offsite rep (if anybody (staff or just a regular member reading this post) would like to know more about my offsite trading/rep/etc just pm me and I’d be happy to link that) but all of my own rep is nothing close to Agent Chris. He is one of the most trustworthy people on powerbot ([member=chris]) and I’m sure you r2pleasant have interacted with him personally and thus can reasonably assume he wasn’t involved in the fake vouching for bumps and that when he says he didn’t notice the fake vouches, he isn’t lying and a part of some huge cover up for something as [relatively pedantic] as this.

So, all in all, this is my view of the situation (that’s turned into a full defense for kaii, unfortunately a bit of repetition between this post and kaii’s so sorry for the extra reading but hopefully I’ve helped). If a staff member would like to ask any personal questions or w.e else, feel free to pm me for my personal skype.

 

Dear Mods / Admins,

I see i'm currently unbanned atm. I don't know if this was by accident or if its just because my temp banned expired. If it was not intended can someone please put a bann tag on my account again if possible? I told my live chat agents to not post anything on our threads yet untill this is fully resolved. Any verdict on the punishment yet (because obviously punishments have to be made)?

Kind regards,
Kaii

 

Yeah your temp ban expired. We're still reaching a verdict and we'll be sure to let you know as soon as that happens

 

Dear Sythe mods / admins,

I see my bann status had changed from "temp banned" to "banned". Any chance for an update on the verdict plz?

Kind regards,
Kaii

 

That was just us catching up with the ban request queue. The poll has almost reached a conclusion re: length of ban. Thanks for your patience.

 

@ Roary : Thanks for the super speedy update, really do appreciate it alot.

Kaii

 

3 month ban.