Amy Nelson, Associate Writer

You've Been Scammed

Scammed. Swindled. Bamboozled. However you want to put it, you got hosed. With the prevalence of trading sites on the Internet nowadays, sooner or later it's likely to happen to you or yours. Trading sites are a great way to save money, reduce clutter, and be green, but they require a certain amount of trust and honesty to work. And wherever there is trust and honesty, cheating and stealing is sure to follow.

On many trading sites, you participate in an item for item trade. You agree to send something, and hope to get something in return. However, this leaves little recourse if your item is never sent. Sure, the user is probably eventually banned, but in the meantime they have received your item and probably several others as well. To make matters worse, the scammer is also likely to just open another account and do it again. Most sites somewhat put the onus of avoiding bad traders on the users themselves. "Check the ratings." "Use delivery confirmation." These are good advice, but often are little help against the seasoned scammers. These guys will set up multiple accounts, and then initiate trades between those accounts and rate them, in order to ensure the look of a good trader with an established history. They usually strike fast, hit several accounts before they are caught, and just repeat the process with new bogus accounts.Even with this protection in place, those in the Goozex forums are often discussing what sort of formula that the Goozex team uses to determine if a user is scamming or not. Goozers are curious about how often scamming occurs and what steps Goozex takes to control it. Ask and you shall receive—we talked to the Goozex team about this issue—and here's what they had to say:

1. When discussing scamming activity on Goozex there is a lot we cannot publicly discuss such as how often and how much they cost the company. Like with any retail and e-commerce company, there are ways to abuse the system. What we can say about potential malicious behavior on Goozex is that it is not at a level that causes current members to leave and stop trading on Goozex.

2. Goozex has several security layers that we cannot discuss. But the simplest and most effective is our feedback and community feedback system. Potential scammers should be warned that the Goozex community will report your ways and you will not benefit from the best game trading system out there.

3. If you do suspect that you're being scammed, we first recommend that you contact us at help@goozex.com with any signs of abuse. We also recommend sending private messages during the trading period with other members. It will become a record for us to reference in case of a bad trade. We also recommend keeping any receipts, tracking information and packages you have help guide Goozex through a trade dispute.

4. Always remember to relax. You're protected on Goozex. Simply let us know what happened and we'll check into it. Once we've got the information we need, you get the points and tokens spent or earned for trades that went sour.