I think if somebody did a quick stat of the number of sales being completed against those that are reported as frauds/ffk, the ratio would be around 100 to 1. Most of the attempted frauds are stamped out due to our open policy where any member is allowed to comment/critic on a sale, making it very hard for cheaters/fraudsters to trick members. We do not deny that there are minor fraud cases taking place every day, but it is more down to the naivety of the buyer rather then a fault of the system. We can build all the protection measures we want, but if the member does not take the effort to protect himself, no amount of measures will help.

We are not a trading forum (as pointed out earlier), hence we do not want to devote our resources to build more features to make trading more complicated. Shackling measures only work for some time before fraudsters figure out a loophole and exploit it. We prefer to educate the members themselves, and as a community stamp out on fraudsters.

well, as per my earlier post, measures can be implemented, but we can't stop them, we might make things worse.

Blocking their ability to post will make them turn to other avenue's say PM's which is less transparent, and their reasoning will be that they can't wait for 3 months to be qualified to post.

Also, it will make post count become a yardstick, something which we have to date tried to maintain as a mere symbol, with no meaning whatsoever. We'll end up with more spam on post count enabled forums by these people just trying to get to 100 - which in turn ruins other parts of the forum.

The bottomline is this, you can never stop a conman - they will keep coming back with new tricks, but you can educate the masses to avoid from getting conned, which while slow is a much more effective approach.