Account Rentals

I think it's fairly well known that the account rentals section of the RS services subforum is a breeding ground for scammers who boot people off of rented accounts, steal the gold left on it, and repeatedly vade to do the same thing over and over again. There exists a list of rental accounts that have been used to scam in the past ( http://www.sythe.org/other-services/1831304-black-listed-rental-accounts.html ), but it isn't regularly kept up-to-date, and frankly the people who are victims of these rental scams aren't ones to be reading these kinds of stickies in the first place.

What I'm suggesting is requiring approval of a rental service thread before it's allowed to be posted. This would involve a moderator logging on to the account to verify that it is not a blacklisted account. Failure to do so would result in an infraction and deletion of the thread (note: this kind of approval process is already in place for some services: http://www.sythe.org/non-virtual-sales/1176964-pizza-services-ticketing-services.html ).

This would not affect legitimate services while disincentivizing rental scammers as they usually use the same account over and over again, and training/buying new maxed accounts would likely not be worth the time/money investment with this in place as - hopefully - each account will only be able to used once. However, this would be contingent on (1) moderators being diligent in maintaining an updated blacklist of login names and (2) victims posting scam reports (or moderators contacting supposed victims to obtain this information).

Thoughts?

 

I'm not too familiar with the account rentals market - is the scam rate in account rentals a lot higher than elsewhere?

It would be a lot of work for moderators to maintain this kind of list. It would have to be a FULL list of all rental accounts, not just blacklisted ones, as a scammer could just rent a clean account to show a moderator then scam with their blacklisted account if all accounts weren't kept track of.

I feel like this would only be worth it if the amount of scammers in account rentals is enormous and surpasses all other types of scamming on Sythe.

 

I'm not too certain as far as actual rates go, but it's certainly a very easy scam to pull off while also being preventable, to a large extent.

Good point about the list needing to contain all rental accounts, it hadn't really occurred to me that someone could easily rent another person's account and use that to verify his thread. With regards to the commitment needed, I really don't think it would require that much work. Sure, it might be a bit cumbersome in the beginning to setup the list, but it wouldn't be that intensive maintenance-wise and I feel that something like this would really help weed-out these kinds of scammers.

 

I think the issue is that the same thing is going to happen what happend to the LoL boosting verifiers (they just become inactive, don't respond). But yes, I do really like this idea!

 

i like this idea as i have a maxed melee which could be rented to people and would help me get vouches to be honest..

 

No support as this would restrict the market as richard does not like to do.

 

Agreed. It's up to the person who wants to rent the account to gauge who they are renting from. Are they a brand new user? Do they have no vouches? Do they sound sketchy? Etc.

 

No support from me. Who you deal with is completely at your discretion.

 

I don't see how this is a market restriction at all - or if it is, one that's of any concern. Who would this policy be restricting? Scammers? Legitimate services won't be affected in any way whatsoever.

And why is this kind of "restriction" in place for some services (see first post) but would not be okay for others?

Edit: I agree that this isn't a necessary precaution by any means, but I think that this is an extremely easy way to prevent already-known scammers from making it back into this market. This kind of scam happens often enough to warrant this kind of action while still being contained enough to easily be regulated by a mod or two (unlike something like account sales)...

 

I'm neutral on this suggestion, it would be a lot more work for moderators, but could quite possibly decrease the amount of people that get booted off accounts from maxed main rentals and lose money ultimately meaning less reports and what not.

 

It's just like any type of trade (especially account sales). If you don't trust the person, don't do the trade.

Although people get tempted by newcomers offering 500k an hour for maxed main rental, they're better off going to someone trusted for 1-2m an hour.

 

I fail to even see how you would even "verify" "legitimate" services. How can you tell who is legitimate? How would you verify these people? Would they simply need to wait x amount of time, and donate x amount of dollars? This would never work. By this logic, we should verify who is allowed to open a gp shop. People get scammed trying to buy and sell gp all the time by newcomers. Should we implement some form of verification process before you are allowed to open a shop of your own? Same with questing and skilling on RS3. The argument applies to nearly every forum. Therefore, no support. This is a market restriction. Deciding to verify these people would set a precedent that could cause people to further restrict other markets.

 

Exactly, and not like services like LoL boosting (where you can still offer boosting but not be verified) or pizza buying (which is a low amount of people doing it) this is something that is fairly popular and we don't want people not to participate in the community because we cant allow them to offer their services or make they go through egregious methods to offer their services.

 

I wouldn't mind verifying accounts, but then again it does conflict with the motto of keeping the market restriction free to an extent. This is my first time seeing the account rental blacklist. If I come across a report about rental services booting/scamming, I'll make sure to get the login username to add to the list.

 

I think you are missing the point - this isn't so much about verifying some services as legitimate, but rather providing a screening against illegitimate services - known scammers in this market who have already been proven to boot people off accounts. All this would require would be a list to be kept and updated with blacklisted login names of known account rental scammers (as well as login names of current services in place, so that a scammer can't pass the initial screening by renting another persons account) and for a moderator to approve an account rental thread by ensuring that it isn't being done with a blacklisted name. This would disincentivize these repeat scammers as the investment for a maxed account won't be worth being able to get away with (hopefully) one possible scam at the most. I don't see how this inhibits anybody from opening up their own service UNLESS they are already a known scammer...

 

This.


It's a similar topic to the "limit who can use the dice lounge" suggestion. People should be able to buy/sell at their free will. If you don't trust somebody, don't trade with them. Simple.

 

A sticky of accounts that have been used to scam previously in this market? I'm all in support of keeping that up-to-date. But as it stands, verifying this would be very ineffective. What's to stop a scammer from using an account that has not been used before, becoming "verified" and scamming soon after? Is it really smart to put a verification system in that is as weak as the SVU verification system? There is no safeguards in place to truly verify that they are legitimate services. The alternative may be renaming it as a screening process, but again, this would be solved with simply keeping the sticky up to date.

Any form of verification or screening process can be argued for nearly any avenue of the market. If we restrict account renters to where they can only rent there account if they become verified, then we should do so to goldsellers, powerlevellers, questers, etc. I'm all for keeping the community as safe as possible; however, I don't see a verification or screening process as an efficient way to do so.

 

I agree the word verified is not the best choice for what I'm proposing, and I'm not advocating that services that "pass" the "screening" be allowed to advertise themselves as being verified in any way. Can scammers use an un-blacklisted account to scam? Sure, but I feel that this is not very likely to happen. Reason being, buying a maxed account is around $300? and training one to max takes around 4-5 weeks. These kinds of investments are not very compelling, especially when you're only able to get away with one scam per account. Account rental scammers do what they do because they know that they can continue running the scam on the same account which would pay off the worth of the account multiple times over. This would hopefully work against that.

Looking at the section now, there are probably only 10-15 active account rental services being offered. All it would take would be a one-time minor inconvenience (not even that, it shouldn't take more than 30 seconds) to allow a mod to log-in, verify the stats of the account, and record the login username somewhere, and then have the same process be followed for anyone else who wants to offer the service. The reason I'm proposing this is because it's a plausible way to provide another barrier of protection against scammers given the relatively low amount of services (compared to gold selling/account buying/whatever else) that would really cut down on the scams we see out of this section..

 

I still think a sticky will be plenty. There is a sticky for accounts that have been recovered, known skype impostors, etc. I think a revamped sticky that is kept up to date should be alright.

 

Yeah at the very least, an updated sticky would be great. Just thought I would throw this suggestion out there and see what people thought