Either corrupt staff or regression in quality of staff

Hi all,

I want to compile a few different cases I've been following and go over why it seems like the staff is at the very least biased or at worst willfully incompetent. I'm going to try to keep it short, but that's not going to happen.

CASE #1
Bert reporting Lebgh0st. It seems like this is partially a case of staff not knowing when to step back and then perhaps not actually reading through the report, and essentially allowing a report to lack evidence but still partially "win."

• Pirate's usertitle is "Bert Gold - Buy & Sell GP - Click Here" and he is the main person responding on this scam report that Bert posted. Even if he's not directly bribed, he received some financial contribution from Bert. It's not crazy to think there's some bias.
• This usertitle is also shared by Blackblasses, Superfluous, and Yoshiki. I do not know if they were involved in the decision-making process but Pirate hints at other staff being involved so it's not unlikely that some were.
• For some reason the fact that they were friends is brought up and they pick an arbitrary 50/50 split as if this is some divorce, citing no rules, and no reasoning behind the number. It's assumed because of this they were incapable of having a valid agreement "of any type" even though Lebgh0st presented it.
• For some reason, voice logs are allowed to be used as proof, voice logs that don't even exist, to insinuate that the reporter (Bert) is potentially correct to state that for some odd reason Lebgh0st gave him a LIFETIME support. Why even bring this up? it's non-evidence. Even though it was brushed off, it clearly had some effect on staff. And why?
• Staff make up a rule that Bert should have been "happy" about the product/service because there's no terms. So people can just report others now because they weren't happy? What if I buy RS gold and I'm not happy by the service, it was slow and it was done in too many trades, and level 3's were trading me and made me feel unsafe. Do I get half back?
• Staff say that Lebgh0st redesigned the website twice and Bert was not happy with it, even though Bert was clearly not promised three designs apparently he is supposed to get infinite free redesigns?
• The 50% ruling is stated as because there not being a valid contract, "though Leb put hours into the website" yet he should somehow get paid half for a full website that he delivered, and designed again a second time free of charge? Clearly staff have no appreciation for the work that goes into this, the hard work and time was already put into the website.
• All of this ends with some weird lesson about friendship.

THIS CASE IS SIMILAR TO:

• Izad makes a design someone didn't like and the ruling by Jason is that [1] Izad misunderstood the user, [2] the person commissioning the work wasn't able to precisely explain what they want, [3] it's up to both parties to understand each other and Izad to make what the client requests, even though [4] Izad has done more than enough work and a refund isn't warranted. No weird 50/50 ruling. Izad was just asked to make some reasonable effort to implement changes he missed. Nothing about there being a bad contract in place.
• Izad makes another design someone didn't like and Andy states that [1] "we cannot expect a designer to provide an endless number of revisions" and [2] Izad provided him with enough revisions, which was one font change, one new intro. [3] Izad stated he would charge for a third revision, sounds awfully familiar, and [4] no refund is owed. [5] If he didn't like the design, he's asked to leave negative feedback (not get 50% back.)
• Grant makes a report on t1n0 because he wanted a site and only got web design or something to that effect and also not happy. King, still a global today, replies and states that the normal flow of a site is getting a web designer to sketch a site, web developer to develop it and [1] how they're separate and how Grant should know. [2] And t1n0 should have mentioned this better, which is funny because it's essentially the reverse of this case (Lebgh0st is a web developer and not a designer, yet Bert did not get design work done by a designer, then didn't like the design surprised Pikachu face.) [3] Even though t1n0 was not clear, and Grant basically received actually a partial product in this case, he did not have to provide a refund. [4] T1N0 promised and did not deliver his work in time multiple times so the punishment was DNT after several chances. Again, no refund though.
• Another case where t1n0 completely fucked someone over where the quality of work was clearly worse than promised, he outsourced it, didn't tell the person, and even then, he was given a chance to provide reasonable edits OR refund it. This is after multiple chances t1n0 got as well. It's not a perfect example but it just shows you again, no weird 50/50 rule and it had to actually be multiple layers of deliberate fuckery first.

OTHER INFORMATION/COMMENT:

• I stated on this thread that I had evidence but I was afraid to post it because I would get banned, I got banned, fine, maybe I should have just DM'd a moderator but the fact that no moderator reached out to me for the evidence is deplorable.
• This is even though I was literally mentioned as being involved in the original post by Bert, staff just removed my comment, and banned me (Gladiator banned me.)
• I designed Bert's 2nd website and UKF agreed to just do it for free to shut him up even though that wasn't their agreement, and made Bert promise that he wouldn't ask for another redesign. I did not charge Bert any money for the redesign and it was infinitely better than the original, although Bert seemed to really like the original design as well. It's only after months of changing his month that Bert decided the previous designs were not good enough. I have evidence of the design/PSD and timestamp.
• I told BlackBlasses about this vaguely and asked for an unban on Discord, said I had evidence that could change the outcome of the decision, was eventually ignored.

My evidence here, I don't care if it's used or not right now but it proved a point that staff clearly aren't taking precedent into account, aren't taking the rules into account really, and are ignoring potential evidence.

1. I bring up to Bert that he can only do simple changes, because that's what was discussed with UKF. https://i.imgur.com/7XrxsCo.png
2. Bring it up again. https://i.imgur.com/OyWEPAB.png
3. Re-iterated again. Note, Bert mentions he can and 40-60 hours, he's talking about Jason. https://i.imgur.com/XQYgsU1.png
4. This part is huge, it's the part I wanted to show staff mainly. Bert basically confirms he paid $2500 for a site without graphics and that he WANTED the plain look (the first design.) https://i.imgur.com/TowcQrG.png
5. Basically agrees only front page needs a redesign should he want to do a redesign. https://i.imgur.com/tjJpHh1.png
6. He has some kind of redesign already done at this point is seems, asks how to change the rows which makes it sound like it's a webpage. https://i.imgur.com/26lhDJL.png
7. Sample of Bert being indecisive and impossible to please/choose something and this is within like the 5th iteration of the 3rd design. https://i.imgur.com/fdnTLwc.png

In the end, any reasonable person would have seen that the website was 100% done and Bert was just arguing over the IMPLEMENTATION of a design. Notice how Lebgh0st originally quoted him $300 for this part and then to spite him raised it to $500. This is $300, or 12% of the amount of work he did on the site ($300 versus $2500.) Anyone can implement the new graphic design for Bert. Staff who have NO understanding of web development should not just say 50/50 because one small part of it was not done. The graphics itself was $400 from Jason. The site was $2500 and this includes an entire backend, an entire billing system, not just some basic webpage. All of this was done and over changing some images to another which might be 2-4 hours of work, staff are telling Lebgh0st to pay for probably 20+ hours of his time back to Bert. This is an insane ruling, and I can't but to help feel like it's because staff are friends with Bert. The most reasonable way this could have gone in favor of Bert completely would be either Lebgh0st being required to implement the third design for free (which is already fucked) or even paying Bert or paying someone to implement the design. Again, it would be nice if any staff member with ANY experience with web design or development would have chimed in instead but I'm guessing with Shin gone that's specifically zero people other than maybe @King


CASE #2
Some random reporting QBD for getting scammed. QBD does not reply with any proof he's hacked and there doesn't appear to be any publicly posted evidence he was hacked, no transparency. Moderators seemed to harass this guy for weird proof that they would not ask anyone else/would not be necessary and again, in private, but he states he showed proof of crypto trades going back to 2017, being in contact with different traders. He requests a police report to be filed, which isn't unheard of, even Amazon and eBay request this at least. If someone's business really is hacked I don't understand why they wouldn't. I know when I got hacked I did something similar. And QBD replies with "hOw Am I GoInG To FiLe a PoLicE RepoRT on SomEoNe WHo I hAvE no CluE WhO It Is?" and staff just let this slide? Has no one genuinely heard of a police report? You just report what happened/what was stolen you don't have to know the perpetrator. That's why you file the report, so they're potentially caught.

It genuinely looks like this guy got scammed and if he did frame QBD there needs to actually be some evidence, or at least there needed to be proof in the past. Nothing is made public, even when he asks to see the evidence.

Staff vaguely reply saying there's "some things" they need to dig into and how they have to ask "irritating questions" then they UNANIMOUSLY agree that there's foul play (several lies, again, no transparency/proof) of this being faked for extortion, again, no explanation whatsoever for the public. "Extra evidence" being provided in private and it just being changed title to "Resolved" not allowing anyone to see what happened here, QBD's behavior, the staff's behavior. A lot of this could perhaps be OK if everything wasn't sealed/not disclosed, and insanely vague. We don't know how QBD was hacked, proof of him being hacked, why he got to just state he can't file a police report without a name, and what lies and evidence there was against foul play.

THIS CASE IS SIMILAR TO:

• I was actually involved in something similar. Grave gets reported for being hacked/scamming. It specifically had to be proven that [1] the gold sold to Grave was stolen in the first place, [2] a moderator still thought I should pay for the unstolen portion. [3] Another moderator said I still scammed. [4] Someone ruled in my favor since it was mostly stolen, after several pieces of proof this was the case. Also they didn't mention this but it was blatantly obvious we were hacked, even the hacker put up a message saying we were compromised, as a weird method of trying to get people to trade which made no sense. It took 4 days and 4 staff replies for a decision and they didn't unanimously agree. Oh and actual evidence. And [5] Title wasn't changed from "Grave Scammed." [6] As far as I remember grave wasn't banned but that's because it was impossible to mitigate against at the time and there was proof I was hacked even in the first post.
• Hattez gets hacked. Moderator replies same day, says he has to pay back to be unbanned. No interrogation of the reporter. No chance for hattez to reply and make stuff up, etc. He is actually assumed to be responsible FIRST and then maybe later something happens.

OTHER INFORMATION/COMMENT:

• Staff completely ignore the rules here.
  • If your Skype account is hacked and used to scam, you will be held responsible if any of the criteria from this thread are met
• The person is asked if he asked for a PM, even though rules specifically state PM is not required. Someone who reads the rules to see how they should trade will then decide that PM is not required. Why make this rule just to selectively ignore it? Why state it so harshly, "you WILL be held responsible" and not "you MAY" if there are exceptions? Instead the reported is harassed and interrogated in every way, seemingly to help out QBD.
• It's funny how the rules go as far to say that even another account, even like a Runescape account is hacked and the hacker uses that, you'll be banned. Staff are confident in reaching that far into ambiguity to ban people but clearly, it's selectively enforced as they please.

CASE #3
Prizford recommends someone purchase an account from someone else and gets banned for a month and DNT. This is notably reported by Video, the effective owner of Sythe.org. While I appreciate him reporting this (this is an example of someone pretending to attempt to be impartial at least, so there's SOME hope) rather than just straight up banning him or handling this privately, it's another case of staff basically making rules on the spot or selectively enforcing them.

Prizford being the little weasel he is and many Sythe members are just wants to make a quick commission here, it's super obvious, so he wants the guy to buy something so he gets commission/MM fee. Prizford notices that the guy is banned on Sythe, after all he's just giving his opinion/middlemanning, but he seems to immediately let the person know that he said he's banned on Sythe. He says in his opinion that it makes no sense to do anything to a pmod which does make sense, if it's being middlemanned, from what I've heard about how they're locked down hardcore. And he says he'll make a group chat/removes himself from the situation and lets them talk it out like two normal adults that do not have pea brains. Yet for some reason Video has "no doubt" it would have gone poorly if it went through, we're stepping into thoughtcrime territory.

Buyer apparently saw the report that got the seller banned, nothing was hidden, and just because someone is DNT it doesn't automatically make them forever a scammer. After all staff pardons many DNT members then they go on to hide the fact that they were ever DNT, that's worse imo. Even the buyer feels remorse about the report. The seller feels bad.

Staff discusses this privately amongst themselves again and then Andy comes with a royal cockshiner response with words like "actively encouraging" and "had this gone through" with Prizford being liable, okay, so he would've been liable, so what? Maybe he was okay with that, and then how you cannot "actively endorse/encourage a user to trade with someone without accepting liability for said trade" which I guarantee you staff will absolutely strike down since [A] it isn't a rule, and the staff CONSTANTLY ENDORSE PEOPLE FOR MONEY. Just save this thread for the day a staff member endorses someone and they scam, and nothing happens. Andy advertising the YanLiLi Discord himself, I'm sure he would agree that this is actively encouraging someone to use their trading Discord and therefore Andy takes all responsibility for all trades occurring on the YanLiLi discord, right? A bunch of staff members endorsing Bert, why aren't they covering Lebgh0st's loss? Gladiator and King endorsing Alch, and that's just the user titles. They also advertise for people on Discord user titles, in their signatures.

THIS CASE IS SIMILAR TO:

For these, I'm focusing mainly on liability, not account sales strictly so a little less direct in that regard and it's also hard to find cases of people "encouraging" people to trade someone this vaguely and it somehow is against the rules so the fact that I couldn't find one should show that it isn't similar to a case and therefore mostly bullshit. I'm interested in any other report saying the similar phrase "you cannot actively endorse / encourage a user to trade ... without accepting liability" as I'm genuinely curious how it was handled if any existed.

• Someone's account gets banned, staff admit it's impossible to prove who RWT'd on the account, so when they say Prizford would be held liable in a blanket statement, super unprofessional. "No doubt" it would go poorly while staff also agree certain things are impossible to tell/prove.
• Anti-scamming, also known as SCAMMING being facilitated by staff and then it's magically okay for people to be irresponsible, because it's staff, and they decide scamming is okay when they say it's okay. Someone's liability is magically gone if staff say they should scam. The scam is approved by Video, so it's okay! (Here's an analogy for those who find it difficult to believe anti-scamming is scamming. First of all anti-scam means to act against a scam. It doesn't mean to scam back. What Sythe staff calls anti-scamming is more like retaliatory scamming, and it'd be like if someone raped your sister so you get Video's approval for someone else to rape them and think it's okay.)

OTHER INFORMATION/COMMENT:

• Staff change the rules and add stickies, more specifically Video himself writes this in Sythe News essentially randomly retroactively releasing obligations to recover accounts, one month minimum liability (remember they said Prizford would just be liable, something they made up but they didn't even specify any timeframes for something that didn't even happen. Just theoretically could have happened.) This being here for nearly 7 years how even with middlemen accounts are recoverable. Then various laxing on middleman responsibility as they saw fit, only for them to just go against all of it and ban someone for something not even included in the rules clearly.

I want to leave everyone with some questions:

1. Why is it even okay for staff to be sponsored by people, endorsing other people's services, advertising their own services in a position of trust? Why do they not have a separate non-staff market user and be DnT on staff accounts? Why is it okay for staff to deal with reports involving people they are sponsored by? Why are staff allowed to ignore FTC rules for disclosures by influencers when even Sythe.org mentions "advertisement" next to their ads?
2. Why is it okay for staff to discuss and come up with discussions behind closed doors, offering no evidence or explanation whatsoever? At least to some degree? I understand private information being redacted but I remember in the past where you couldn't DM staff literally everything as well, it had to be posted publicly. Even Sythe himself would always say it should be posted publicly and that the community should be able to see it/decide to some degree so at least let them see it, no?
3. Why can staff at this point clearly abuse their power to make any determination they like without even REFERENCING a single rule? At least they should go based off some established rules or precedent, instead, they ignore precedent, and come up with different resolutions that they seem to grab out of thin air based on the person involved. Why are rules added only to be fully ignored? Why does basically one staff member make all the replies now until he states other staff were involved and agree without even stating their names?

TLDR:
Staff do not actually discuss anything important publicly, ignore the rules as they please when making a decision, ignore the facts there and change the shifting of the burden of proof from reporter/buyer and seller as they please while getting paid to endorse/advertise others and avoiding liability, and at the same time being hypocrites and holding others accountable for simply stating their opinion regarding a trade with someone. These same staff can then rule essentially rule more favorably if someone who pays them makes a report.

 

I hope to see responses from the staff team on this one in a public matter.

 

Also to add how inconsistent / terrible the rules are, I'm for some reason not allowed to do something which is not explicitly NOT against that specific forums rules such as selling an account with x RP on it without a screenshot directly on the post itself. (There is no rule that requires me to do so) : Selling 394k rp


Meanwhile explicitly required by that subsections rules, it's not applicable for this post as pathogen is friends with staff : Selling Maxed Ironman, 5B Bank,3A Longsword, T Bow, Infernal, inquisitor mace, much much more

 

Also curious whats with the 27k$ collected in community repayment funds rn : https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1GtWMwqHby5qMisEkXTrQbefXn3ZPm6V77 , there's not even 27k$ worth to be repaid here : Been scammed? Read here. Community Repayment Fund Thread! (Sythe PM VIDEO WITH REPORTS)

 

Case 3 - i dont think it was harsh at all. Im gonna keep it short n sweet. What prizford did, in principle, is the exact same as helping a dnt/banned user evade said dnt/ban. Hence the ruling. I see nth harsh there imo.

Prizford was PUSHING for a sale to be done with a dnt user. How is this different from me listing names for sale owned by chris kane?

 

@Sythe This is worth checking out, Video who is an admin vouched for someone on his selling thread and that someone scammed someone for $3000 and he gets off with no punishment.

A regular user recommends that someone buy an account off someone who he didn't know was DNT at the time and this regular user gets a 1 month ban and the DNT rank when his ban is up, how does that make any sense?

 

My case is so biased that I am forced to give a 50% while the whole website is working but I have no clue how is this number/percentage even logical, based off what did admins/staff/mods calculate it?

This is the most biased ruling.

Edit: I would like that admins take a look again at the ruling and think again.
Edit2: Not to forget what @Bert did to @Shin and got away with it and got his money back: Bert / GP Casino Dispute

Thanks @Grave for putting all of the efforts into this

 

Sythe will never be fair or just, I've given up hope a long time ago

 

Case #4:
They falsely accused me of being someone else (because we shared the same first name) and wouldn't even reply to my questions about it.
I literally had to fucking dox the scammer who they were accusing me of being to prove it was not me (with admin approval of course)

Now imagine how fucking stuck and helpless someone would feel if they weren't able to actually do this.

The staff team is actually dogshit,

How can we fix this?

Remove everyone except 1-2 of the best ones and start over.

Support.

 

You guys are just catching on to this now? The quality of staff members has been going downhill since I was first active. Its a side effect of having a volunteer position that holds a lot of power with little to no actual responsibility or accountability.

 

Who are you? Don't remember asking for your input + I already went more in depth on other threads as to why Prizford's punishment is too hard considering nothing has happened to Video when someone actually got scammed after he endorsed them.

 

BigBoiBets requesting a pardon for refusing to fulfill their end of a deal
^scammed 7k refunded pardon got insta approved [pre sure logo being friend with sythe admin had nothing to do with this hehe am i right=? ]


@raconzy got banned for working with banned user ariba





while logogaming was never banned for working with banned user bigboibets

 

Certainly not going to close this thread, but a reminder that spam posts will be deleted.

 

oakdice literally got unbanned without posting a pardon lol Oakdice

 

Speaking as an individual here (my views ≠ staff's collective views):

#1 - I have no idea what went on in this report. I asked others for their input but didn't participate because, as you mentioned, Bert rents my UT, and I didn't want to get involved as a result. That's a personal boundary, and I don't think people who discussed the case or replied on the thread did so inappropriately or with their financial interests in mind. I also didn't handle any of the other reports you referenced so can't compare or contrast.

Relatedly, one thing I think the community sometimes confuses is the staff's collective opinion and the personal opinion of the mod who posts on a report. Any report that isn't straightforward is discussed by some subset of the staff team, and then one mod posts the collective decision. Just because, say, Pirate posts on a report doesn't mean that he made his decisions unilaterally or with limited input from others. In other words, I think the community sometimes fixates on individual staff members without recognizing that they're often just messengers for collective decisions which, of course, you can disagree with.

#2 - This was an interesting case. More investigative work went into handling this report than any other I can recall in my time on staff. I realize it's an unsatisfying reply, but transparency is being limited for two main reasons: 1) We don't want the accuser to figure out how we pieced together what they tried to do; and 2) We don't want other people to try similar things in the future.

Without getting into specifics, it became abundantly clear that the accuser tried to execute a sophisticated, multi-stage extortion attempt on QBD. There were plans in place for how to continue the attack after an initial staff decision, but to your point about staff bending the rules, no actual scam took place here. Basically the whole thing was intricately fabricated by someone who knows a lot about how Sythe operates (i.e. not a random newcomer). As you said, our ruling was decided by unanimous decision, and we certainly got it right.

#3 - I also had no part in these discussions but do think we should clarify the rules about our stance on these sorts of situations. "Hard vouching" for other users seems to be becoming more common, and we should address it as such. I think you'll hear from a couple other staff members in this thread before we meet to discuss everything as a group, so keep an eye out for those posts.

 

So doing a full website apart from a 3rd design for free deserves a 50% refund? Just based on what criteria did you guys decide?

 

On the personal and moderation level, do you think it's fair?

 

based on what? Him having both sythe accounts talk to the same person as I was told was one of staff's "compelling" evidences.
You can trace his btc wallet down and see he has 3m$ in it, definitely a probability he wasn't lying and an actual trader, based on previous resolutions regardelss of mod's subjective opinion, the report should be handled in the same manner.

Him not having an active discord isn't a shock, people who actually make big money such as someone i'm guessing mining 15k$ worth of ethereum a week, would easily be using telegram solely.

The inconsistencies could of all equally as been faked by QBD such as, doing it at a time where he is allegedly known for being asleep, and intentionally pming both users of the same skype to raise suspicion (even though not sure how that made is suspcious)

The inconsistencies I personally see, is why no gold sellers were targetted *after* conducting the main "scam", and regardless makea guaranteed few thousand $.

I was also informed QBD allegedly lost 10b+ staking the previous day, gambling is a severe addiction and can easily drive a degenerate to do something like steal 15k$ to gamble with in hopes he wins and then pay it back.

Oh well, I have more to add but won't spend time when my post will get deleted from slander. (or spam by hahanerd)