Newbies, beware blackmailers and propaganda merchants as well as scammers

Now I'm sure you guys have all seen on these boards the people who will scream out the name of a scammer and tell you to stay away from them. I've seen an increasing number of posts from randomnamewithnumbers1235461 types who are utterly convinced they have either been scammed or that something is a scam, or that you should sell Bitcoins and so on without giving any actual facts to back up what they say. These are people I will label as either blackmailers or people who want to spread their own form of propaganda in order to get you to do something that will benefit them.

You've heard of conspiracy theorists yes? Well the real conspiracy theorists out there completely make up bullshit in order to try and make you believe something either by outright fabricating photographs or just making shit up and passing it off as fact.

There are people out there who are exactly like this but they do it in a less direct way to benefit them. you have people who blackmail people who are selling goods in order to get money from them or ruin their reputation and then you have people who want to spread propaganda in order to scare you away from Bitcoin or for that matter people who are desperate to keep the difficulty the same or to get people to sell so they can buy more Bitcoins. If you want a real life example I suggest checking out CNBC so you know what the hell I'm on about, on that channel everyone is trying to sell you something and give you investment 'advice' that is basically them trying to get you to buy stocks that they own so the price goes up. You'll have such and such CEO of irrelevant tech company come along to try and get people to buy the stock they own and convince people that the company is doing fine despite never giving any numbers or proper profit/loss reports. My favourite one that I remember was how all the stock traders including the ones off CNBC were ranting about Apple despite how badly it was performing and how it had no real new product that would get them doing well again. I just don't watch these news channels any more though because they just piss me off to no end because of how blatantly they lie to people, you can get all the information you need on the internet usually.

Unfortunately a lot of this kind of thing can come down to experience in dealing with these kind of people but questioning everything even what I say will help you a lot and even with people who don't look like scammers remember the old saying "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is". As for the people who rant about how bad Bitcoin is and how much they hate it, they're pretty harmless I think, you wouldn't want them in office, but they aren't trying to manipulate the market in their favour and make you lose money.

Various examples I've seen:

. Random poster tries to convince you the Bitcoin price is going to fall, usually wants a bunch of people to panic sell and cause the price to drop slightly so they can make a slightly bigger profit

. Random poster keeps screaming that a person they bought from is a scammer but doesn't provide any evidence of their sale or order, keeps spamming the topic and just keeps screaming constantly and arguing with everyone, will usually use capslock and exclamation marks to emphasize how bad the accused is

. Random poster will throw a fit after not having been replied to by tech support within a day despite how everyone knows Bitcoin is experimental and a lot of companies these days are start ups, even then big mega corporations take a while longer than a day to respond usually

. Random poster picks fight with a seller who's been accused of scamming and another Random Poster rushes to defend them

One obvious one that has been around in the beginning I think:

. Random poster wants to buy Bitcoins through reversable payment systems like Paypal, what happens here is they'll ask the seller to send Bitcoins after giving them money and then once the Bitcoins come through they'll reverse the transaction and get there money back leaving the person who sold the Bitcoins out of money

I hope this helps the people out there who have no experience with this sort of thing, the experienced posters around here can feel free to add more stuff if they find anything. Be suspicious of everything and question everything, I'm sure some of this might seem mad but it's helped me a lot of times in the past even in dealing with people when it didn't involve money. I'm not saying you can't trust anyone, more that you should find people who are trustworthy instead and this sometimes might mean having a bad experience in order to find out. You won't be able to completely avoid these situations all the time but you'll have a much easier time of dealing with the majority of the stuff that's out there.