koin, nice explanation.
I'm aware of the man in the middle attack.
As it is, I'm kind of a veteran in the bitcoin community (if you can call anyone that), but not a veteran trader, haven't done too much of it, but like to stick to the safe side.
I would mostly be hard pressed to do any transaction without knowing who I'm dealing with, that includes checking PGP-signatures and such.
Obviously everyone needs to be careful, but a first time trade is always that someone needs to do. Obviously, a first timer could select to trade with an experienced trader (with a good rating), and then the newcomer would have to go first, ie. send LRUSD first in this instance.
Trusting someone blindly on the internet without knowing details, and falling blame to man-in-middle attack is a bit naive, and then that could be a good lesson for anyone that experiences this.
But, just wondering, perhaps instead of yelling fraud at first sight, we should ask for more details, and then we could judge better wether it is a fraud or not ?
I'm just thinking what if a newbe genuinely have some LRUSD, and he actually do want to buy bitcoins (strangely just Moneypak or PayPal in this case, on a bitcoin forum, so that may set off some alerts of course) then he should be allowed to explain himself, but I understand your sceptism in this case.
Let me reiterate the man-in-the-middle attack so everything is clear.
Bob offers to sell bitcoins for Paypal or MoneyPak.
Tom comes along and spots this, he goes on the forum and claim to offer LRUSD for PayPal or MoneyPak.
Alice sees Tom's post and agrees to purchase LRUSD of him, and sends him 20 USD worth of PayPalUSD, only that transfer in reality goes to Bob.
From Bob's point of view everything looks fine, he has received the PayPalUSD, so he sends the bitcoins to Tom.
Time goes by, Alice receives no LRUSD, so she complains to PayPal. PayPal reverse the trade off Bob and Tom runs off with the bitcoins.
Now, how could this be prevented. We had 3 players here, Bob, Tom (the scammer) and Alice.
Alice, the purchaser of bitcoins, could've checked whether the alleged seller, Tom, has a WOT-rating. If he has (obv. he has not as he's impersonating Bob), he would be able to authenticate himself on bitcoin-otc channel, and/or send a PGP-signed message to Alice, and Alice could verify it (check signature) against the public available PGP-key she could fetch off bitcoin-otc web-site. If Tom failed to produce a valid signature, Alice would reject the trade, and then avoid being scammed. However if she didn't check that Tom was in posession of the private key associated with the WOT-rating, then she could fell prey for this scam.
But shouldn't anyone doing trade on these forums know this to be a 101 trade rule ?
Personally I rather err to the safe side, and think it's better to be safe than sorry, even though it can be a bit painful to start an initial relationship with such a careful trader.
If cush32 decided to go first however, then I think the likelyhood of this being a scam would be less. And he should've had some feedback in the honest traders thread and/or a WOT-rating to instill some confidence.
Also the fact that he never got back to this thread and he was active 21st of July does not speak to his advantage, that along with the low post count surely makes it all suspicious, so you're probably right that it's a scam.
