Market fraud - maybe add few more rules

Hi all,

I am new to the forum and new to Sweden, which I love so far. I've read some posts in the Market related topics and it seems that there are fraudulent sales from time to time where people lose money.

In the forum I am a member of in my "old" country, being able to post an advertisement was a privilege. User had to be a member for 6 months and have a number of forum posts which would mean that he is an active member of the community. Also posts in some of the topics were not counted - ie. talk about movies, shows, books, ads themselves, etc. Only IT related topics like software, hardware, audio and video, etc. posts counted for this status. If someone tried to boost his posts (by adding simple comments to topics), admins would delete them.

I don't know if this forum supports these functions and if admin team has the time to deal with it, but having a bit more rules could prevent fraud on the long run.

My two cents.

I have read the current rules and they say that you must be a member for a month. SweClockers does take 30 SEK in order for you to be able to post, but that does not prove that you are a "good" person, only that you can be traced, but not sure if police can/will do anything in case of small fraud.

Based on my experience, people buy from forum ads because they want additional sense of security and to buy from a like minded individuals. Otherwise they can use Ebay/Tradera/something else.

Edit: to elaborate - idea of these rules on that forum is to prevent fraudsters and "professional" sellers from participating, but to enable "real" forum members to sell their own equipment. There are also rules about 1 ad in 10 days, and some more, but not sure if they can be easily implemented.

Edit2: by being a new member, I have a new "view" of the forum. Just because something was "always done" in a particular way, doesn't mean that its good.

I agree with anon265474 that you can check who you are buying from, but not all users do that and then fraud happens. I am not for 100% hand holding, but a lot of people still fall for online fraud but would not fall for real world fraud. Its like their part of their brain turns off when internet is involved So thought that a bit of help from SweClockers could reduce it

I do understand that implementing this (or similar) would take a lot of effort from admins, and probably reduce some of the traffic (as pointed by siglolmic). My idea was to put this in the open and see if it can bring a change. If it does, good. If not, I tried and that's it. I was triggered by reading some posts in "SweClockers - Marknadsreferenser (läs första inlägget innan du postar!)" thread which describe fraud.

On that forum it did work and also reduced some offtopic noise about buying and selling, between "professional sellers" and regular members. We also had a lot of problems with people asking for price assessment questions like "How much I can get for i5 2500k" and then someone would send a PM and persuade them to sell it for less than it is really worth.

At the end of the day, most users are happy with the rules and how it turned out. Some, newer members are not, because they can't post until the reach the "age" and post count limits, but it is understood that being able to sell is a privilege for regular members as opposed to a right and it seems to work.

Again, my idea for this post is to start a discussion. Probably there are other, better ways to reduce the fraud. This was just and idea that works on another forum.

Well, I am new to Sweden so kronor is new to me

Also, "my two cents" is an expressions that has a history behind it. Not sure if it would be understood properly if I said "my two kronor". I did work with companies from USA, UK and Canada as an IT engineer and that's probably the reason I picked up a lot of their "expressions".

@Rayintaz - my goal was to "prod" members to see if there is something that can be done to improve the system, on which most would agree. Nothing more. As I said, I read a few posts where members complained about fraud and that inspired me to start this thread.

@anon257891 - I wanted to see if others feel the same way and if admins may be willing to implement changes. As to what changes - something like participation in other parts of SweClockers and not just marketplace and also 6 month instead of 1 month delay before you can post an ad. Also, sorry if I offended by explaining, its in my nature since I've been working with end users (IT support) for past 15 years so it became a habit.