If this is the case then it would be a very high risk to purchase this account. The risk of a perm ban is high and if this happens then all of your accounts will be banned as well.

There will always be the chance that an account has been banned multiple times in the past. The best course of action if you wish to buy an account would only to buy from a reputable seller, to specify in the escrow agreement that the post history should meet a certain high criteria (obviously this would entail using escrow) and to put sufficient effort into your posts once you start posting from your account so that it does not matter if the account has been banned in the past (because the future posts would not warrant a new ban)

If people start trading them then the current testnet will simply be abandoned by people who are testing it and will move to a new testnet. There is no use for any test btc and no merchants accept them for payment so once you have them there is nothing you can do with them

Sure they can. They can be free, which is how they were intended to be.......so people can test them

This is the winning bid. I will PM you a payment address.

See this post that haploid posted over a year ago (LOL). I would suggest sending to that address.

He hasn't been online in almost a month now so I somewhat doubt that he is going to come online for the sole purpose of receiving what is now $0.80 worth of bitcoin

The fact that bitcoin is pseudonymous (for small to medium amounts for all intensive purposes this means it is anonymous) means that scammers are very much attracted to bitcoin and bitcoin related deals.

If you attempt to buy or sell bitcoin in this section then, more likely then not there will be multiple attempts to scam you. In order to protect yourself against scam attempts, you should always use a trusted third party escrow (a middle man) to protect all parties of a transaction. The cost of escrow is very small, especially considering that there is generally little chance of you recovering any funds you are scammed out of if/when you do get scammed.

Just because you are paying in a way that might be abel to be reversed does not mean that it is safe to send funds first if you cannot (should not) trust the person you are trading with

Who should you trust to escrow your transaction:

• It is generally a good idea to only use someone who is publicly offering escrow services, this will allow you to check an additional reference for potential problems
• Generally speaking, someone who has a Dark Green number under their profile (their trust rating) without adjusting your trust settings
• Someone who, in your best judgment is not going to scam you - it is ultimately up to you to find someone who you can safely say will not run away with your money being held in escrow
• Someone whose PGP/GPG key you previously have prior to contacting them for escrow (it is okay if you import their key immediately prior to requesting their escrow services)
  

Who you should not trust to escrow your transaction:

• Anyone that does not have at least Light Green trust. Anyone who fits this criteria and is offering their escrow services is almost certain to scam you.
• Anyone who you are not confident is going to treat all parties of a transaction fairly
• Anyone who you are not confident is going to not scam you while acting as escrow

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Note to mod note: This thread is technically in the wrong section, however due to the large number of recent successful scams in the currency exchange section, and the lack of a similar warning in the Currency Exchange section, I feel that this is necessary to post here. There are similar warnings in the Goods, lending, and auctions sections, but not one here, so I feel that it is appropriate to have one in Currency Exchange. (Either this or a similar thread really should be stickied here). I had bounced the idea of a similar thread off of a moderator via Skype however did not receive any kind of response so I decided to take the initiative myself.

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OP note: feel free to make suggestions for improvements, however I prefer to keep this thread as general as possible and to avoid making any specific recommendations in case a particular piece of advice does not sufficiently protect someone.

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The below post is additional good advice

I would like to publicly state that I was asked to give a price on how much it would cost to escrow this signature campaign. I gave the OP a quote and I will follow up by editing this post if/when escrow is funded to pay all participants.

You bid on 2 slots, you were asked to pay for 2 slots, yet you were told that you won 1 slot. I would hope that this fact alone would have set off some kind of a red flag.

I think a way that these kinds of scams can be prevented in the future is to announce the payment addresses publicly on this thread and

This is true, however there are certain qualities of the testnet that makes them easy to acquire. Also if testnet bitcoin starts to be traded then nothing would stop the testnet protocol from being forked to a new testnet with a new genius block in order to take away that value (this has been done before)

I am fairly certain that this giveaway is over, however for some reason I doubt that satoshi is going to want to claim your giveaway, nor will he be in any way in need of an extra .5 BTC

Funds have been released to the winner via 02593d27287c5dc183766d7208daaa9c9ec9d1d92d09d44f4b9fb85928d34c71

Congratulations and thank you for using my escrow services.

Correction, this is the current high bid

^^current high bid.


I have agreed to invalidate chronicsky and btcblogger's bids however if they wish to bid on any of my auctions in the future they will need to pay a deposit to guarantee they will honor their bid.

Hey it is a free market and people are willing to pay for it. I think it would be dumb to do something for free when there are people willing to pay.

*I also charge .0075 not .075

NL=Netherlands right? Did you buy them directly from the perth website or buy them on the secondary market? (So I can get an idea as to what you paid for them.)

Do you have any idea what you are looking for the perth coins?

You posted that address only ~1 month ago. Can you sign a message from an address that is older then that? (Your previous loan request said that you cannot)

How would you feel about me citing forbes? They say that many (40%) of guns used in violent crimes were acquired via illicit means (illegally), and another 37% acquired the gun they used for their violent crime from family or friends (for a total of 77%). They also say that violent crime has heavily declined when gun sales are strongly up.

I know there have been a number of studies that correlates higher gun violence with higher gun control laws, with violence increasing after stricter gun control laws go into effect.

The point I am making is that if you have more guns used in violent crimes when gun sales are (nearly) banned, then why would it not be the case that more scams would occur with purchased accounts if account sales were (nearly) banned.

I have given him negative trust so he shouldn't be able to scam from that account again.

The account was not used very much, so the most likely result is that he was not able to successfully able to find someone who he was able to scam.