Of Unicorns and $225 SROs: Why the Classifieds are a "Sucker" Minefield

[cnelk]

Wouldn’t it be easier to make someone to post in the classified have like 1000 posts or something?

That type of thing isn’t ‘uncommon’

 

[mthayr]

I can only imagine the possibility of a negative domino effect of people not being able to access the classifieds and possibly other parts of the forum.

It may, but you might also be surprised - unless you bank exclusively in person and still use a wired telephone, the technology is pretty standard fair across the interwebs. That being said, 2FA is not a "fix" - hence why it got one paragraph, and behavioral changes took up the other seven.

Stop believing that you're entitled to a 50% discount just because its the internet, stop thinking that an expensive piece of gear is the deal of the century if it is 50% off (its a scam), and stop blaming a payment method for your own failing to talk to a person IRL.

Those were the point of the post, 2FA would just help, a "nice to have" feature, if you will...

 

[Hnthrdr]

Yeah this scam-demic sucks. I think it’s not too hard to vet stuff out. If it’s over a dollar amount you would be uncomfortable losing, call the dude, check the item out, get a feel via FaceTime. TBH most of us have a “look”. Get a feel before any money changes hands

 

[robby denning]

Hey, I see the tags on here and OP, Thanks for the post.

I handle the editorial/business side of this place but Ryan will see this and he’s always looking for a way to make the classifieds better. I really don’t know about the 2FA requirement.

But what the OP posted can be used right away by every member selling on the classifieds.

And I do know many of the scams could’ve been prevented if people would quit trying to save a few bucks on payment method. Just ask the mods who deal with this. And this pattern of long-term inactive accounts being hacked is the main trend we’re seeing lately. Don’t buy anything from someone with that profile until this gets straightened out.

 

[Beendare]

Is there a thread for every person that got scammed in the classifieds? grin

Honest question; Is there a way to add feedback to sellers/buyers mimicking sites like Ebay or Archery Talk that have a process where you rate sellers and give feedback. When I see a 5 star seller on AT with lots of good feedback, I know it's going to be a good transaction.

 

[fngTony]

Is there a thread for every person that got scammed in the classifieds? grin

Honest question; Is there a way to add feedback to sellers/buyers mimicking sites like Ebay or Archery Talk that have a process where you rate sellers and give feedback. When I see a 5 star seller on AT with lots of good feedback, I know it's going to be a good transaction.

Yes, under their profile there is a button that says feedback or feedback profile. If you’re on a phone it doesn’t show the feedback count under the avatar, you have to click the profile first. Don’t know if it visible on tapatalk

 

[Yukon Cornelius]

I’ve been watching the "I got scammed" threads pile up lately, and while I feel for anyone who loses hard-earned money, we need to have a blunt conversation. We post thread after thread debating whether to use PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, Friends & Family, or Goods & Services, but we are ignoring the root of the problem.

The scammer epidemic on Rokslide has less to do with how you pay and everything to do with being gullible. We are feeding this problem by being so eager for a "deal" that we toss common sense out the window.

"There's a sucker born every minute..." Scammers aren't geniuses; they are just waiting for the next guy who thinks he’s "beating the system." Look at the recent examples that have been making the rounds:

• A BNIB $1,400+ Leupold Mk4 4.5-18x52 offered for $675.
• The $600 Trijicon SRO offered for $225.

Ask yourself: Why would a total stranger give you a 50-60% discount on an in-demand, high-value item? Its simple... they wouldn't. Good gear is not cheap, and it holds its value. When you expect "yard sale prices" on premium optics and technical gear, you aren't finding a bargain—you’re volunteering to be a victim. As the saying goes: "If it’s too good to be true, it probably is."

This is all of our shared responsibility: get into the real world. Scammers thrive on anonymity and digital distance. They will not stop until we make it difficult for them to deceive us. We bear some of the responsibility for feeding this problem by expecting quality gear for pennies on the dollar, and failing to do even the most basic due diligence.

If you want to avoid being scammed, you have to move the conversation into the real world:

1. Talk Directly to the Seller: If you are dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars, pick up the phone. Ask for a FaceTime. If they "can't talk" or make excuses about why they can't show the item in real-time, walk away.
2. Be Suspicious of Ridiculous Discounts: If the price is a massive departure from retail or even the normal used market, your guard should be at an all-time high.

I’ve suggested this in the past, and I’ll state it again: The forum mods can make a difference if they require Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) to use (buy or sell) the Classifieds. An increasing number of these scams come from compromised accounts that have been dormant for long periods of time. 2FA would effectively shut the door on scammers using these "ghost" accounts to fleece people. Its offered for use on the forum in general, its time it becomes mandatory, at least if you want to buy and sell.



Scammers are here because we are making it profitable and easy for them. Until we stop being "suckers" for a cheap deal and start treating these transactions with the healthy skepticism they deserve, the problem will continue. I challenge you all to be smarter buyers and stop whining about being ripped off if you fall for a too-good-to-be-true deal. Its the only way to keep this forum a place for legitimate hunters, not a playground for thieves.

In fairness, the leupold love here makes the leupold a low cost sell item. Just saying.

 

[Maverick1]

Stop believing that you're entitled to a 50% discount just because its the internet, stop thinking that an expensive piece of gear is the deal of the century if it is 50% off (its a scam), and stop blaming a payment method for your own failing to talk to a person IRL.

Stop telling other people what to believe, what to think, or who to blame. ?

 

[waspocrew]

I don’t buy from the classifieds often. Typically, if I do, it’s going to be for an amount I won’t lost sleep over.

Deals can be had, but I’d rather pay a little more and know my product is coming from a reputable source.

 

[robby denning]

This was posted by @taskswap on another scammer thread we busted this morning who pulled nearly the same tactic, waking up an old account. Good advice:

"No, but scams have been around forever. Forums are rich sources of back-links and other SEO shenanigans, and that crowd has been building these "sleeper" accounts for years to make their posts. You see them everywhere. We own a Heartland RV and are a member of a forum for same, and one or two get "woken up" every week over there. It's always the same pattern. An account quietly made, an innocuous reply here and there, and all of a sudden an oddball post that almost looks like it fits if you're drunk and squint a bit. If there's a response to the outcry at all, it's always indignant, and actually sometimes THOSE are even written by humans (paid $0.25 a post to some fat old guy in a wife-beater in Chennai) to help continue the theme.

Once you see the pattern, though, you'll start seeing it everywhere. There are a few things they can't help. They never really seem to contribute anything. Their questions or posts are always "sort of right" but there's always just something odd about them. They're (nearly - legit accounts get hacked, too) always low-post accounts with very generic profiles. And (usually - the patterns are evolving) if they aren't caught/banned you'll see a link to a product or other Web site within 3-4 posts of when they get woken up.

If you just Google "buy backlinks" this is one of the dirty secrets of how that industry operates."

 

[z987k]

This was posted by @taskswap on another scammer thread we busted this morning who pulled nearly the same tactic, waking up an old account. Good advice:

"No, but scams have been around forever. Forums are rich sources of back-links and other SEO shenanigans, and that crowd has been building these "sleeper" accounts for years to make their posts. You see them everywhere. We own a Heartland RV and are a member of a forum for same, and one or two get "woken up" every week over there. It's always the same pattern. An account quietly made, an innocuous reply here and there, and all of a sudden an oddball post that almost looks like it fits if you're drunk and squint a bit. If there's a response to the outcry at all, it's always indignant, and actually sometimes THOSE are even written by humans (paid $0.25 a post to some fat old guy in a wife-beater in Chennai) to help continue the theme.

Once you see the pattern, though, you'll start seeing it everywhere. There are a few things they can't help. They never really seem to contribute anything. Their questions or posts are always "sort of right" but there's always just something odd about them. They're (nearly - legit accounts get hacked, too) always low-post accounts with very generic profiles. And (usually - the patterns are evolving) if they aren't caught/banned you'll see a link to a product or other Web site within 3-4 posts of when they get woken up.

If you just Google "buy backlinks" this is one of the dirty secrets of how that industry operates."

This is where it can be of a large benefit to know what American English is, because most of these people are grammatically off in a weird way. Probably in a British ESL way.

 

[taskswap]

This is where it can be of a large benefit to know what American English is, because most of these people are grammatically off in a weird way. Probably in a British ESL way.

I don't disagree in general, but these techniques have come so far, so fast, that I think time is quickly running out to rely on the text itself as the fingerprint to look for. Also, there are plenty of genuine British-origin folks who just happy to say "mum" instead of "mom" and it's not a clue at all.

As it happens, online forums are a major source of training data for their models, so I think we're already in the phase where the ones that look off aren't so much "the smoking gun" as "the low effort scammer using outdated tools." And let's not forget there are actually still human scammers involved! Some may even be using AI tools to write their posts (time saver, hey) but it doesn't have to be a complete robot to fit the category.

There's no perfect answer to this, but IMO one of the fastest ways to tell a scammer setting up a con is exactly what happened here: interact with them! Even the latest scam methods have a hard time fooling real people when they're paying attention because the bulk of the thought goes into the "setup" - the account creation, the sleepers-awake post, the follow-up, and the "goal" post - often a link to something, but can be just a text comment that might end up the result of a Google search. Something even as innocuous as "I had good luck with ELD-X's this year" can be one of these scams if they help boost sales for a product when other folks search for "ELD-X success rates" later. As you can imagine, those can be extremely subtle, especially because legitimate people post legitimate opinions too.

But there's often very little thought in responses and follow-ups, because usually there doesn't need to be. As long as that text stays up, it can be a marketing boost. If you go ask that poster more, you'll often find your biggest clues in how they drop the ball on those replies, like if you ask them what spine arrow they mounted it to, and it's obvious they don't even know it's a bullet, not an arrowhead.

(Source: I'm a software engineer and have helped online services implement content-moderation and abuse-detection strategies for 15+ years now. I've seen a ton of these patterns myself and I talk a big talk, but I don't have a perfect solution any more than anyone else. Be "bear aware" folks. There are bears out there, and they're among us.)

 

[z987k]

I don't disagree in general, but these techniques have come so far, so fast, that I think time is quickly running out to rely on the text itself as the fingerprint to look for. Also, there are plenty of genuine British-origin folks who just happy to say "mum" instead of "mom" and it's not a clue at all.

As it happens, online forums are a major source of training data for their models, so I think we're already in the phase where the ones that look off aren't so much "the smoking gun" as "the low effort scammer using outdated tools." And let's not forget there are actually still human scammers involved! Some may even be using AI tools to write their posts (time saver, hey) but it doesn't have to be a complete robot to fit the category.

There's no perfect answer to this, but IMO one of the fastest ways to tell a scammer setting up a con is exactly what happened here: interact with them! Even the latest scam methods have a hard time fooling real people when they're paying attention because the bulk of the thought goes into the "setup" - the account creation, the sleepers-awake post, the follow-up, and the "goal" post - often a link to something, but can be just a text comment that might end up the result of a Google search. Something even as innocuous as "I had good luck with ELD-X's this year" can be one of these scams if they help boost sales for a product when other folks search for "ELD-X success rates" later. As you can imagine, those can be extremely subtle, especially because legitimate people post legitimate opinions too.

But there's often very little thought in responses and follow-ups, because usually there doesn't need to be. As long as that text stays up, it can be a marketing boost. If you go ask that poster more, you'll often find your biggest clues in how they drop the ball on those replies, like if you ask them what spine arrow they mounted it to, and it's obvious they don't even know it's a bullet, not an arrowhead.

(Source: I'm a software engineer and have helped online services implement content-moderation and abuse-detection strategies for 15+ years now. I've seen a ton of these patterns myself and I talk a big talk, but I don't have a perfect solution any more than anyone else. Be "bear aware" folks. There are bears out there, and they're among us.)

I'm more talking about syntax and words not really in the American lexicon. Like Kindly.
AI is also really bad at putting sentences together that normal people would use. Sometimes it's actually the correct incorrect usage that let's you know they're real.

 

[Pacific_Fork]

I got a great idea. Before purchasing an item send a buck picture and ask them to say what it scores and whether they would pull the trigger at how many points it would take to draw the tag. An AI response should be obvious. Ok, enough of my bright ideas Merry Christmas all!

Kindly, PF.

 

[dsotm]

1. Talk Directly to the Seller: If you are dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars, pick up the phone. Ask for a FaceTime. If they "can't talk" or make excuses about why they can't show the item in real-time, walk away.

I bought a muzzy off another forum from someone with a very low post count this month. Even texting can give you a clue if they are legit or not. Also anyone that says "email me or so and so [email protected]" is a scammer.