Gift Card Best Practices: Arming Yourself Against Scammers
Bitcoin is Freedom Money
Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin to be a peer to peer, sovereign digital currency. Money for the people, without borders. We created Noones to be a platform for freedom, facilitating peer to peer bitcoin transactions: for the people, without borders.
There are hundreds of ways to pay for bitcoin on Noones, and one of our most popular methods are gift cards. Unfortunately there are bad actors out there that come up with new ways to run scams on good people who choose to use gift cards on Peer to Peer marketplaces. This is a problem that every peer to peer marketplace faces. Your best defense is education: understanding what to do in advance of your trade to best protect yourself from being scammed.
We sat down with our disputes team to find out what information we should arm you with so you can have the safest possible experience on Noones, and to find out what you need to do to ensure you have the evidence you need if a scammer flips the script and claims you in fact, are the one ripping them.
Are Some Gift Cards Better Than Others?
There are some gift cards that do not offer a way for you to verify the balance on the card without redeeming the card. For example, Steam and Amazon.
The best gift cards to use in the peer to peer environment are non-reloadable gift cards with a website available that allows you to enter in the gift card code and see the balance displayed. Examples of gift cards that offer this are OneVanilla, iTunes, Walmart, and Apple.
Don’t Trust, Verify
Before you proceed with a trade, take the time to review the profile of the user you’re considering transacting with. Sometimes, users with a lot of positive feedback are actually bad actors that work in teams and use a range of methods to make their profiles appear to be legitimate. Tricky, right?
Sometimes, it appears a user is a legitimate and trusted. No negative feedback and a great many positive feedbacks. Take the extra time to read the actual feedback left on the users profile, and don’t just glance at the first page. If you see feedback comments that are repeated over and over, exactly the same… that’s a red flag. Or, if the feedback comments are by different users but the comments are oddly similar in tone and word choice… that’s a red flag.
We’ve blocked out usernames but in this example below, the feedback comments were each left by different users but you can see clear similarities in the language they use. You will also notice in both of these examples that they are all left on the same day.
Consider your own, genuine use of Noones and the feedback on your own profile and compare that and what you see on other trusted profiles. You’ll start to be able to spot these differences.
If you find a great trade opportunity but you really can’t tell if a users profile is real, please turn to the Noones Telegram channel. Community and collaboration: share the profile in the Telegram and ask other Noones users if they would trust this user to do a trade. There are also members of the Noones team who participate in the Telegram channel and are there to answer questions or hear your concerns.
Gathering Evidence In Advance
You’ve got the right gift card. You went over the users profile and feel pretty good about the trade. Guess what? You’re not done. “Don’t trust, verify”, remember? There are scammers out there that will complete a gift card transaction, redeem the card, and then open a dispute claiming you gave them an empty card. This is where gathering evidence in advance will possibly be your best defense. We can’t promise you that you will definitely win disputes by following these guidelines because believe it or not… there are people out there who will spend a great deal of time editing photo and video evidence to make it appear they are the victim. But if you really are a good actor and you take these steps in advance you are very likely to win your dispute against a scammer.
Screen Record Everything, Step By Step
Whether you’re on your phone or using a computer, you’ll want to screen record everything from start to finish. Make sure your recording shows the date and time. Do not crop your screen recording, as it could hide necessary aspects our moderators need to see.
Step 1: Initiate your screen recording.
Step 2: Navigate to the website where you are able to confirm the balance on the gift card. This shows our moderators that you did this in advance of the transaction and shows us what the balance was, and at what time that balance was there.
Step 3: Navigate back to Noones. Head to that trade chat and give the vendor your card information.
Step 4: Navigate back to the website where you confirmed your balance. Reload the screen until you see your balance disappear. Again, remember to make sure the TIME is included in this recording and to record all the way through these steps by switching browser windows.
Step 5: When you see the balance disappear, navigate back to the trade chat on Noones and wait for the user to confirm a successful trade on the recording.
Step 6: Upload the video to Google Drive or Dropbox and send the link in the trade chat so the moderators can review.
If the user does not confirm a successful trade, but instead alleges you delivered a gift card with an empty balance… you are now armed with optimal evidence to share with our moderators in your defense. Not only does it help you when you take the extra time to do this, it also helps every Noones user. We are able to ban accounts that do this to our users and we gain so much from your help in identifying who they are.
What We Do To Keep Our Marketplace Safe
Not only do our moderators and disputes team offer world class, user first support but they also are consistently removing scam vendors and scam offers we detect on our platform. We look for users that use a technique you see illustrated above, profile building. Additionally, please always report users who encourage you to take your transaction off of the Noones platform or who share outside contact information in a chat. These users are in violation of our Terms of Service and are almost always scammers hoping to have easier access to their mark: you. Your reporting helps us ban these users and keeps our community safe.
We hope you’ve found this information useful! Please consider sharing this with your friends on Noones or anyone participating in peer to peer gift card transactions to buy bitcoin. We need to look out for each other and work together to make Noones the safest and most trusted place to buy bitcoin peer to peer.