Hey Guys, I was just recently scammed 110k worth of gift cards from a guy by the name of Pablo31104. This guy has also scammed mcg1 and Woodbury3 from what I have read. He is banned now, finally. I post here because I wanna get the opinions of others on a topic, and that topic is: Should the victim of the scam get a refund of there money from the scammer's account? In my opinion, I believe that if AndrewKM can remove a balance from a user's account for ranks, why can't he remove the balance from the scammer's account and put it into the victim's account where it belongs? Most of the people that get scammed have screenshots of the transactions. THIS IS EVIDENCE!If it's enough to get someone banned, why is it not enough to get our money returned? Is it to much work for our "Dear Leader?" Now I show lots of respect for AndrewKM, and I marvel at what him and his carefully chosen staff has done to create such a wonderful server, but I think that there needs to be better player compensation when they are scammed large, or even small amounts of money. Now I received a Forum inbox from pbrassat, saying that I was given a Forum Warning for "Unnecessary comments in a complaint, tagging Andrewkm when not needed." I don't think I was wrong to tag him in that post, which you can go ahead and read *HERE* I did not do anything that hindered the case, and I was providing good information about the scammer. This has been a lot of reading so far, and I thank you if you have made it this far. I think it is wrong to not get some sort of compensation for our losses. On another note, I think the staff is getting a little to comfortable in there positions. Most of them either don't use their power to enforce the rules, or some of them can't understand the rules, and try to enforce them in the wrong way. This article will most likely hinder my chances of getting mod, but I have applied 4 times, and every time, it is someone I have never heard of or that most people don't know that gets the position, so I have given up on the ECC staff and AndrewKM at the moment. If this shows anything to them, it shows I am not afraid to take a risk, if it benefits the community. If any of the staff, or players are offended by this, GOOD! It was intended to open the eyes of the community to a possible solve in not only overall player enjoyment, but also help with the issue of people not being able to rank up because they get scammed, and receive no help. So I leave you with this: Should the victim of the scam get a refund of there money from the scammer's account? Post your answers in the poll, and feel free to post below Have a great day, and Merry CHRISTmas.
They shouldn't. The reason for this is that the economy would be so so inflated if we gave back the money to the victims. Do you have any idea how bad the economy AND server would be if all this money was back in the economy? And for scamming, next time choose someone a bit more reliable. There are plenty of other trustworthy people on the server.
Thanks for your post! I see where you are coming from, but I disagree. The economy would NOT be inflated anymore than it was when the victim had their money. Undoing the transaction wouldn't affect anyone else. Simply returning money to the victim from the felon's account wouldn't inflate the economy at all. Thanks again for the reply!
Should the victim of the scam get a refund of there money from the scammer's account? Although most regular ecc users would vote yes to this, because it was their hard-earned money, im going to vote no because this has been stated in the past by MANY mods, and andrew himself. Andrew does not refund money because of the rapidly inflating economy. Money is magically added into the economy every time someone buys ecodollars for USD, /sell hand, and a few other ways. However, Andrew needs money to be taken out of the economy everyday in order to balance it out. He does this by the lottery tax, multiple spawn markets, rank applications, and, you guessed it, not refunding people who were scammed. In my opinion, I'm voting no to this idea because it is a major role in balancing the economy and keeping it stable. Also, why would anyone be dumb enough to buy donation features from a resident? It's sketchy. You could have bought them from a staff member or a trusted player who's sold features before. In addition, there is a sticky in the "For Sale/Wanted/Feedback/Job Offers" section where people state who they bought donation features from and how everything went. I suggest you use this before buying features from an unknown player next time.
Thanks for the post! I think I agree with your post more than dumdum71's. Although I still think it should have some sort of compensation, even if it isn't all the cash, it could be as small as a couple thousand, or some nstars or something like that. Thanks again!
Yes Because they just took your money and you might need it for something elce and you might want your money back and go rage mode at them
Vortlex is making the point I am. I bought the gift cards, so why can't I be compensated and given the giftcards? I have proof so yeah.
I personally think that they should be refunded. Methods of dealing with an inflating economy should not have disproportionate effects on some users whilst not others. These methods need to be server-wide techniques for reducing the total amount of money entering the economy, equally effecting all users such as the recent reduction in farm /sell prices. Sure not refunded scam victims is *a possible* method of balancing the economy, but I don't think it is a fair method. There are better, more just, ways of achieving this. Such as reducing /sell prices, adding extra purchasable ranks, the new spawn town auctions etc. Another point, these scams often involve purchasing gift cards for ECD. This is completely legitimate activity (it is the only real life money to ECC transactions which the rules allow for), and so I don't see why those who are unfortunate enough to be scammed shouldn't be refunded. EDIT: This post assumes that you are correct in asserting that the reason scam victims aren't refunded is in deed to balance the economy. There may be another reason which I have completely not thought about!
In response to to HuntFishLive, compensating scammed users would barely touch the economy. Not that many users get scammed in the first place, and usually it isn't by that much money. A 100k ECD here and there won't hurt anything - it was in the game to begin with! I think that scammed users should FOR SURE be paid back their loss if the transaction occurred in EcoDollars, but if it was in real-world money, than that's none of the server's business to begin with. The only problem I see with this the capacity for the server to enforce this. For example, if I paid some guy 250k for a gift card, and he couldn't/didn't deliver on it, then paid my 250k out to five different people before being banned, how's the server to deal with that? I also understand where the server is coming from with this rule. They don't necessarily like the fact that a lot of users buy donation features (the main source of "scamming"), because it keeps the EcoDollars floating around in the server, versus taking it out of the economy if you donate through the website yourself - which is understandable. I myself am a pretty active loan provider with a very successful loaning business on the server, and have only one goal: to make money. In order for my loans to succeed and make profit, I have low interest rates which makes my profit margin lower, but boosts the likelihood of the loan being paid back. If someone every was to just scam me on a loan, it'd be a lot of my profit, and I'd really love compensation for something that wasn't caused by fault on my part. While the idea of compensation by the server is a great one, it would be (sadly) very difficult to implement . Vortlex, StoneIronZ, dumdum71, Dewsy92
No. It just doesn't work. People transfer their bal to other places. Here is a a typical scenario Player gets scammed by no.2 no.2 buys some stuff from no.3 if we take the money from no.3 then he looses the item sold and the money and yes its too hard to get items back.
Andrew has said many times that buying donations from other users is very risky, and is not recommended...
First off I would suggest proofreading your post to make sure it is grammatically correct from now on. Makes you appear more professional. It may even get your point across better. In response to your question, no the money should not be refunded. In a sense banning a player is practically death penalty. Andrew kicks them out of the minecraft world. That's not enough for you? Think of all the money and donations that they had that are thrown into void. Whenever you exchange money for anything in game you should take great precaution. I think scams are a way of money being removed from the economy and are slightly beneficial. Are they the best way of getting money out? Absolutely not. But scamming is a part of life. What if someone robbed another person in real life and they got their money back for that? The government is not responsible for returning stolen goods and Andrew is not responsible for your carelessness. He does his best which is banning the scammer.
I am really sorry to hear that you were GiftCard Scammed, HuntFishLive. We all wish that we could get our money back from these, but that will never happen due to the fact that money moves fast. It can move from account to account multiple times, making it too much of a job for Andrew.
No, it is too much to ask a server owner to go in and investigate every scamming complaint and correct it. I think it is asking for too much of their time. You bought donation features from a Resident who has been active less than a month. Be more careful next time.
I have over $800 in donations bought from other users and I've never been scammed even once. And this is not because I'm a known member, it's because I carefully choose who I buy my donations from. Buying donations is risky, and it's your own responsibility to do background checks on someone. This, very much this. Enforcing scam paybacks is what we do when someone wants to be unbanned, in most situations, the money is paid back in a reasonable time and little harm was done. But, sometimes someone doesn't appeal his ban and he may have put his money in signs (trackable, but time consuming for us) or given it to other users (trackable, but, taking money out of unsuspecting people's accounts. Not a great idea) There are too many variables, it's a time consuming process and will just cause more victims. The best thing you can do is, don't get scammed. This may sound silly, but you can prevent getting scammed by doing background checks with large sums of money.
I have been scammed 1.68 mil and I have gotten 0 of it back, I made a suggestion saying we should get money back but in the end I realized that it is not a good idea to have money returned. 110k isn't too much and you can easily bounce back from it, next time choose your people you pay money to carefully, because let's be honest, a resident with no features who can't spell his advertisements right, what did you expect? I bought the majority of my features for 6k/usd specifically because I knew it was safe with these people. You should have seen this coming and IMO it was your own fault, all of you, sorry.
The main reason I said what i said was because of a post i saw of KHobbits. It is copy and pasted below. (This was in a thread called "An Addition to ECC's Monetary System" that some of us may remember. Spoiler Since this topic is already too long, and full of idiotic suggestions, I'm betting that most people wont read this far. As a reward for reading so far, I'll spill a little secret or two. Ecocitycraft already has a inflation problem, the 'ECC powers-that-be' are aware of this and consider it a constant battle. The /sell command on ECC 'prints' money, that money doesn't come from a pre-made pot or from a bank, the money produced fm /sell is simply spawned. The same is true from donation money. To balance this income out, we need to despawn (delete) money. For this we have server applications such as the rank and town applications. This is an ongoing war. Whenever the total balance of the server (the money in all the players balances, signs and buildings) exceeds a certain amount, we need to rebalance the economy doing one of the following: - Lower the amount of spawned money from /sell (lower farming prices) - Increase app costs - Sell more market slots - Add a new type of app to drain money - Extract money from ECC using taxes One final little secret, if it wasn't for players giving up ECC or getting banned, we would have already lost the inflation battle. At the moment, we stop counting money after a player is banned or leaves ECC for a certain time, because that money is no longer part of the active economy. There are millions of lost Ecodollars in peoples accounts who no longer play, or left stored in forgotten town chests. Another reason that the server should not do that is because people would be stupid with their money. People would take the stupidest risk because they would know if they got scammed it wouldn't matter because they could just get their money back. I have been scammed once in my 5-months of ECC and that was because I was a resident desperate for money and I made a very stupid decision. After that, I have not been scammed once. It really isn't that hard.
they have stated several times they do not encourage donation selling. you go and buy a donation from a random resident and you want to not get scammed?
Recently i have had 350k taken from me in a long term scam, saying that you have to be careful kuke, is not always safe, as i found out when a now Perma-banned user Rolled back his donation features and i lost my most prized donation. The user in question was on the trusted list in the Mayor/President+ section, so naturally i thought he could be trusted. But with that rollback as mentioned earlier other users were effected, so it was a large scale and a long term scam. The reason i want to get them to pay us back is to realize what they have done, and to make sure that our well earned money is safe even i a scam. As i said i have lost 350k in total, that's not easy to make back that quickly so even when this happened 2 weeks ago i am still at 127k so making the money back is hard, especially when you lost it in the first place. ECC should be a scam free place and to revert the scams would make sense to.
