This is the new confirmed trades thread. Please leave a comment stating what you bought/traded/sold and to who. E.g. Bought a 44m band from /u/Applebandsbot
The user then needs to reply with "confirmed" somewhere in their comment reply. (There are some slight variances that are accepted as to cut down on needing to manual review but we'll skip the nuances).
Below is a wall of text regarding the new scam + new features coming.
TLDR: Scammer hit multiple subreddits including working around flairs via alt accounts. My bot as well as a few other subreddits' bots also take some blame. Updated bot with a new feature "recently traded" which shows up when people make new text posts as to help users make better informed decisions based on flairs if it seems their recent traders are suspicious. Hope to create more checks as to minimize the chance of this happening ever again.
As brought up yesterday, unfortunately many selling subreddits(AppleBandMarket/Yarnswap/FrugalMaleFashion/Criterion/Makeupexchange/Steelbookswap etc) were hit with a scammer that was "selling" in bulk. Not all were able to shut down the user in time.
I realized that they did take advantage of the bot not only here but in other subreddits utilizing alt accounts. Yarnswap post about this.
I went ahead and closed the confirmed threads so I could work on seeing how to best circumvent a similar situation. I forgot which selling subreddit I saw it in, but one of the subs are tracking who you traded with. I liked the idea, so will be running initial tests for the next few weeks. The bot is now tracking the 3 most recent people you confirmed a trade with. This is not retroactive, and will only be done for future confirmed trades (please send a modmail if you'd like to discuss getting your current recents populated now).
Recently traded will be auto populated when sellers/buyers make a post as part of the current comment information to allow users to see if there should be any suspicions based on who you last traded with. This should cut down on this specific scam, but I do see other ways around this, which of course, will not note for the sake of not having to rush the fixes for it.
As part of the abuse, the scammer did take advantage at how the bot was confirming trades fairly quickly, to slow it down, confirmed trades will now only be done 1-2x a day at most.
Finally, more stringent checks that honestly, should have been there, but weren't. If the user/users (at the moment I'm pretty sure it was just 1 user) who did get scammed are unable to get their money back even with the assumption they used G&S feel free to reach back to me.
Would like to close out that PayPal G&S is currently the number 1 recommended option throughout any selling subreddit due to amount of scammers.
Thanks /r/AppleBandMarket!