Posts Made By: Benjamin Smith

Yep, I'm 95% sure I just lost $2k to this scammer.

I fell for a scam from the same guy. Just starting to get into this hobby, buying my first scope... $2,000 lost. I submitted an wanted ad for a SW Esprit 100ED, which sells for $3200 new. He then moved the conversation to email with the name/email address of Yody Tapsiwan <topgreatyody@gmail.com>. He sent pictures of the telescope and offered it to me for $2000, a good but still reasonable price. When we agreed to the price the seller asked to receive money via paypal "friends and family" method to avoid 1099 reporting. I asked to move to Zelle, and they agreed - providing their supposed spouse's email address <Latia9248@gmail.com>. The Zelle transaction took 1 week to complete, but it eventually went through. The seller states he never received the money but my bank confirms it was deposited in his account. 

Weird and twisted part is that he continues to engage. I asked him to send me a pic of the telescope in front of CNN from today and here's his last email 

I am happy that Capital One can see the Zelle transaction was not received.I have never heard of  any Zelle transaction taking days or weeks before being received.Zelle transfers are instant and always deposited within a few minutes.For now i am more interested in you getting your money back as i would not want to be involved in anything that would eventually rip or cheat you out of your money.

Let me know once you get your money back from Zelle ,so i can have a clear conscience about all these.

I can't think of a motivation for this, except to delay any reporting to Zelle or authorities so more scams can go through? Any way for what it's worth I submitted a cyber crime report to the FBI. https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/scams-and-safety

After getting scammed out of $2k from a hacked user with good ratings this week I decided to look into the minimum password requirements for users here. The system just let me change my password to "password." This puts everyone selling and buying on here at risk. A user account with decent ratings could easily be hijacked, making such scams a pretty simple affair. This is truly unacceptable. Minimum password complexity should be a strong, validated password before being accepted by the system. I don't think I'll be using this site again until common-sense security measures are put into place.

sorry, delete - double post

All this may be true, but is 100% moot if a password is compromised. The user account that was hacked and scammed me has been removed, others already reported them.

Perfect! Thanks for this. I'm sure there's no way to reset all previous weak passwords because you're likely only storing the password hash. Only way to fix that would be a forced password reset for all. If you're seeing a significant uptick in account take-over this would be the next step to consider.

Thanks for forcing a secure password. Hopefully that made some lemonade out of my 🍋 🍋 =)

This is a page out of Slick Deals' playbook. (https://slickdeals.net/deal-alerts/)

Problem: I find myself incessantly refreshing the classifieds 10-20 times/day. I'm sure I'm not the only one. It would be nice to have the ability to create a custom alert when a matching item gets listed matching some search criteria. 

The process would look like this:

A user has an item he wants, so he creates a classified alert with the search string and matching Classifieds section. To prevent abuse and to not use too many resources, you could limit each user to say 3 classified alerts.

Each new for sale classified posting would be matched against each user's classified alert search strings. Any match would trigger an email that goes out to the user with a link to the relevant classified ad.

Although each post would trigger many searches, this could be optimized. Any increased server resources may be offset by fewer users who are hammer-refreshing all day long.