You are all new and semi-new members here. PayPal is a very risky payment method. It is reversible and easy to charge back. The risk is worsened by PayPal's 180 days time window for disputing and charging back payments.

I suggest you withdraw your PayPal funds to your bank accounts. Then withdraw the money from your bank and use the cash to buy bitcoins.

Another alternative is to use escrow and wait for 180 days. After six months, escrow will then release the coins to you. Why 180 days? That's because you can no longer charge back or dispute the transaction 180 days after paying for the coins.

PayPal is an invalid collateral. It is reversible and you can initiate a chargeback after getting the 0.002 BTC. Yes, it's that easy.

I doubt lenders here will loan you any coins, knowing the risk of a collateral chargeback.

Nope. Absolutely not going to work here. You can consider yourself out of luck. PayPal and newbie and bitcoin do not mix.

So many red flags. Why can't you withdraw the money to your own bank account? Instead, you are offering an enticing incentive of earning up to $15000. That is a major red flag. It sounds like luring someone to bite the bait. People who say things like this are usually con artists. Fraudsters.

PayPal with friends and family option not available is an even bigger no. That's because it is very much reversible and the payment is at super high risk of being recalled and disputed.

As for building trust with bitcointalk members, you need to start with small amounts and demonstrate a long history of unchallenged PayPal trades before advancing to the kind of amount you offered above. OMG I still can't believe what you proposed above. $60K to $100k monthly with PayPal with no friends and family option. This is a tragedy and disaster in the making and people here should be forewarned about it.

There is one alternative, yes, and here it is:

1. Escrowed transaction. A trusted escrow here holds the bitcoins while you send the PayPal payment. Then:
2.  When done, you wait 180 days and if there is no dispute or chargeback issues during that time, the escrow releases the bitcoins to you. 180 days because this is the maximum time window allowed by PayPal to dispute a payment and initiate a chargeback.

You're wondering why nobody is taking up your offer. Isn't it obvious? Or are you simply ignoring the red flags in your post? With or without escrow, Skrill is a high risk payment method. It is reversible which is why neither Localbitcoins nor any trusted escrow here can offer protection in case of a payment recall by Skrill. This can happen days or even weeks after the transaction.

0.5 BTC converts to slightly more than $7000 today which is a large amount of money. You have a new account here with no history of unchallenged Skrill payments to encourage others here to feel comfortable about doing this trade.

You should also know that if anyone accepts this trade, the usual practice is for escrow to hold the bitcoins until the transferred Skrill funds are successfully withdrawn to the coin seller's bank account without any issues.

What do you mean by saying escrow through attorney? Are you saying you will appoint an attorney to hold your money and the attorney then assures the seller he will pay him and tells him to release the 10+ coins to you? You must be dreaming or high on something if you think anyone here with a grain of common sense would do something so unsafe as you suggested. The naive will probably fall for that but a sharp thinking seller will rightly decline this proposal of yours.

For one, the attorney is not a trusted escrow. He can claim to have passed the bar and hold these and those degrees and credentials but these all do not make him a trustworthy escrow. For one, YOU could be that attorney acting as escrow to yourself. Or he might be a friend. Attorneys have been known to commit fraud too. Just because they passed the bar doesn't mean they're society's most trusted human beings.

Escrow should be a reputable middle man on this forum with a long and established history of performing escrow transactions. Or an exchange such as Localbitcoins. If you still insist on using this "attorney" then I'm inclined to think this is one elaborate pre-Christmas scam in the making. Prove me wrong by using a trusted escrow on this list:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855778.0

Buying 100 BTC in Russia might not be an easy and safe task. If you follow the news, you should have seen TASS's article about Russia Will 'Never' Consider Bitcoin Legalization or even a major bank's prediction that Russia & China will engineer bitcoin apocalypse which signals the difficulty you might face in legitimately obtaining coins of that magnitude in either of these countries.

Meeting up with a trader and paying cash for the coins is simply not safe. I wouldn't advise doing this. For one, if anything goes wrong during the transaction and the authorities become involved, I don't think you will get any help from Russian law enforcement. In fact, you might face questions concerning the source of funds and they might even blow up the matter into one along the lines of money laundering.

Russia's exchanges are not particularly safe to trade on. Just look at the BTC-E story. And now we have Yobit. If you value your money, you would not risk it with shady names such as Mayzus or any of the fly by night exchanges created a day or so ago.

Traders based outside Russia will probably feel uneasy and nervous about flying to Russia and meeting you somewhere, knowing there is a chance that they might never be seen or heard of again after the transaction.

If you have a way to move the funds to a country with a robust law enforcement system or one with safer banking infrastructures, then you might be able to find a way to buy the entire coins or at least in tranches. You can easily get these coins in countries with more relaxed and liberal rules for the rich such as Singapore or the UAE. Bring all that money to Dubai and you will be welcomed like a Sheikh (well, not literally but you will definitely feel welcome!). BitOasis is the leading exchange in the Middle East. I'm sure you can get coins from them if you have the money to pay for them.

Buying the 100 BTC from a major exchange such as Bitstamp or Coinbase might be extremely challenging if you have a new account with them. They might want to explore your source of funds. The worst part of the process is when they hold your money indefinitely while they do their AML checks.

You have nerve to demand that coins be sent first. You are paying with PayPal, a super risky payment method. You do know PayPal is notoriously reversible, don't you? And where is the long list of positive feedback proving you are trustworthy?

You want $6500 sent first and you're paying later with your reversible PayPal. Someone should pinch you, wake you up and get you back from la la land.

Even if you send your PayPal funds first, it is still risky. You can dispute and reverse the payment after you get the coins!

I agree. The current fees are a flawed system. Banks indeed would be my choice of transferring small amounts of money. With the current fee structure, applying bitcoin to the retail environment is very cost INeffective for the consumer. Imagine being charged $4 for a cup of coffee and seeing $19 debited from your bitcoin wallet for that purchase.

On the other hand, this has its advantages. Gets rid of all the nano amounts sent by transaction spammers flooding all the yet to be confirmed blocks.

The problem is lenders here are also sick and tired of scammers taking advantage of them. Having said that, you will find it extremely challenging and difficult to get a loan of $5500 without first offering valid collateral.

The other challenge is trying to convince anyone here with a grain of common sense that these criminal kids (just repeating your words: “drug dealing kids robbing people at gunpoint”) will take any positive and constructive interest in bitcoin. They are poor and compounding the matter is that they are poor criminals (you said it yourself) which leads me to think they might instead conspire to steal your $5500.

Am I right or am I right? No option for being wrong here. Don’t you agree?

If I understand correctly, you’re selling an ounce of .999 gold (all the limited edition and one of a kind nonsense aside) for a buy it now price of about USD 38,000? I’m assuming that would be the price of the coin alone and it doesn’t come with any preloaded bitcoin value, going by the description on the original thread:

General information
You are ONLY bidding for the coin itself, not the bitcoin value inside the coin. If you win a coin, you can choose to buy it loaded which will add 1 BTC to the auction price. Or you can choose to buy it empty. To the US we can only sell coins that are not loaded by us. The "empty" coins can easily be loaded with bitcoin value by the customer himself/herself, however.

If I assumed correctly above, that’s a pretty steep price.

With Au trading at USD 1270 per oz as I write this, I cannot fathom how the coin’s claimed uniqueness justifies a listing price of 3000% of the coin’s gold value.

PayPal’s risks aside, transactions here are a two way street. It’s not just about someone buying your coins, paying with PayPal and later possibly reversing the payment. There is still room for you to dispute the chargeback or reversal. If you take the risk of trading with a newbie or anyone with no trade history, you should perform extensive checks and due diligence work before accepting PayPal. Escrow is strongly advised.

The proper way to do this safely is to sell your coins to highly trusted and reputable traders here. A quick search will yield several trusted members whose threads show and prove a long history of successful PayPal trades. Some of them have hundreds of clean and undisputed PayPal payments backing their good name and reputation. With these sellers, you would need to send your coins first or they might consider using escrow.

It's impossible to borrow here if you can't offer or provide valid collateral worth substantially more than the amount you need. Personal information, passports and ID and other documents are not considered valid collateral here. That's because they can't be sold in the event you default on the loan. Rephrasing that, the lender can't recover the money if you don't pay.

This is your first post on this site. Asking a loan on your very first post is very suspicious. You will not get a loan here unless you can provide solid repayment assurances. By that I mean collateral.

$1000 is a lot of money. You should approach family members or your local bank and discuss borrowing from them. To make it less burdensome to source this kind of amount from a single lender, try borrowing a lower amount from a family member and the rest from the bank or a local credit provider. As for borrowing here, I am certain you can't.

I suppose the plan to sell that nonexistent iPhone on the Goods section didn't work? If it did, you would have $500 to "invest" in your plan above.

Seems to be a carefully planned new scheme, complete with a list of terms, an investor form for the many you expect will invest and of course you had to include the only address you will ever accept deposits into... all other bitcoin addresses are not legit so for those who want to join, this is the official ANN thread for this investment. 


Why not sell or pawn the car or borrow from the bank and invest it?

This is all beautifully designed with impressive words, but that red paint is difficult to ignore.

There goes another throwaway account. They keep doing this for paltry amounts. Sometimes I wonder if they have some kind of boiler room or basement where they all work as teams creating a bunch of accounts every morning and using them to scam here, even small amounts to make it easier to convince their victims to send first. Then at the end of the day they consolidate their "earnings" and the boss pays the scammers their cut.

If this scammer works alone, then this is a sad story of desperation and desperate times. All this effort for a couple of bucks.

I already had a feeling about this. There was another borrower who wanted $100 for his account as collateral. When Parodium offered $50 he quickly seized the opportunity which led me to think the account was being sold disguised as collateral.

It's a scam. Try harder to find excuses but it doesn't change what it is: a scam.

Firstly, why would you create a "bitcoin shop" complete with chat personnel to get rid of your extra bitcoins? Why not trade them here where escrow protection is offered. Why mislead people here by saying "trade anonymously" when in fact you take PayPal on that site (which is not anonymous)?

I know the answers to the above questions and here  they are: you created the page to give the scam a sense of legitimacy. Being an online shop, you expect buyers to pay you upfront without escrow. The online shop facade is there to make people feel comfortable about sending money first.

This is a scam and nobody should trade on that website. If you do, you can count on being scammed and losing your money.

Risks exist when you are negligent or if you are not careful. There is no risk if you use a reputable listed escrow. Some scammers know this and they will try to trick you into believing that they contacted escrow and negotiated the deal. They will send you a copy/paste of the escrow instructions and chat conversations with escrow. Within the chat is the escrow’s bitcoin address (edited to show the scammer's bitcoin address instead). All fake. Photoshopped screenshots and edited messages. The solution is to directly verify the deal with the escrow. Send a PM to the escrow to confirm the agreement and the escrow’s bitcoin address.

Always use a reputable escrow from the official escrow list. Always. Be careful when you are offered more favorable trade terms than the rate you originally offered but on the condition that no escrow is used. Scammers will try to make you comfortable by suggesting splitting the transaction into smaller amounts. If they know they can’t steal your $3900 they will do and say anything to get a lower amount. Some will even offer to start with $100 to put you at ease. If you fall for that, you will realize it’s a scam when you see no bitcoins in your wallet but the scammer is happy with the hundred bucks which, for some of these lowlife scum, is worth a month of backbreaking work wages. So be on your toes and stay alert when trading.

Another risk factor to be aware of is outright deception. The deal is done and bitcoins are escrowed but days later the scammer will say their bank blocked the money or no money arrived or the bank marked Skrill as a blacklisted originator account... they will say anything to stall the release of bitcoins and possibly even retrieve the coins from escrow. They will concoct fake bank statements or photoshop the screenshots of their bank balances and transactions to show no money arrived. If this happens, contact Skrill and request that they do a SWIFT trace of the transfer (you will need the scammer’s bank details). When the scammer knows you are one tough nut to crack and you know your way around these things, some will continue to fight your tenacity and blow up the drama further but then they will have realized that they stand no chance of cheating you.

PS.. I just read your PM. Do NOT do the deal on Skype. The chat conversation you forwarded to me sounds like a fake SebastianJu. Contact him directly by PM on his official page:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=18640

Yes, trust would be the most important challenge to overcome and the test to pass before anyone can simply give you a stack of cash and wave you off with a sayonara at the airport. For obvious reasons of course. That’s because it might be the last time they’ll hear from you (and scammers here have been known to go through great lengths to steal a mere $5!) so yes indeed, anyone who might do this will want to get to know every atom of your life.

That aside, doing a courier job involves understanding customs rules and the risks of declaring and not declaring all that cash. Plus, for your courier career to truly take off, you will need to be a flexible traveler and hold a first world passport for unhindered and visa-free travel.

Then you would also need to carefully consider the risks such as who you are doing this job for. You wouldn't want to enmesh yourself in police troubles or anything remotely similar, especially when or if the job involves traveling to certain countries where currency exchange control laws are tightly enforced.

All the above aside, it was fun writing this to help contribute something hopefully helpful. But realistically, as a newbie, you will struggle finding “employers” here.

Don’t forget to use escrow if transacting remotely. Never consider sending even fractional amounts upfront. As for SEPA, be very careful and do an identity check. There have been stories of SEPA transfers reversed or originating from compromised bank accounts.

Another risk factor is the MITM scam. Scammers have been known to place ads on the internet advertising cars, watches, motorcycles etc and instructing slow-thinking buyers to pay into accounts of unsuspecting bitcoin traders. Verify the identity of any buyer offering SEPA.

2 BTC converts to a large amount of Euros. Approach this transaction with lots of caution and a sharp mind. When transacting in person in Munich, meet in a safe and very public location, preferably inside a bank where you can engage the assistance of bank staff to ascertain the money is genuine. There have been cases of buyers meeting up and later assaulting the seller after getting the coins, then escaping with the same money they paid for the bitcoins. Be careful.

Good luck and stay safe.

PS.. forgot to add the risk applies both ways. It’s not just about the seller. To the buyer, transact safely too. Meet in a safe place and preferably take someone with you. Don’t accept instructions to transact inside a car or to travel to a remote location with all that cash. There are scammers who advertise fictitious nonexistent coins on this site with dangerous motives.

Why would someone transact with you when Indian law states:

A foreign national of non-Indian origin, resident outside India cannot purchase any immovable property in India unless such property is acquired by way of inheritance from a person who was resident in India. However, he/she can acquire or transfer immovable property in India, on lease, not exceeding five years.

You should acquaint yourself with the law before making an offer to sell an immovable property because India has strict contract and property laws, especially for transactions involving non-Indians, PIOs and NRIs.

I suggest you edit your post and clearly mention that you are selling the property to anyone who holds Indian citizenship.

Can't you quickly link your Visa card to your PayPal then if you need it so urgently? This would be the fastest way.

As for borrowing $4 here, it's not a quick or instant process. It involves providing collateral, discussing repayment terms and things like that. I know, it's only $4 but scammers have been known to scam for a few satoshis here. Imagine that. So lenders tend to tread carefully even for paltry amounts.