When buying and selling in-game items, how do you avoid getting scammed?

Which gamer hasn’t encountered the situation where you want to boost your character by buying some in-game items? You don’t want to farm all the items/gold you need to get it, and you have cash lying around. So, you find someone willing to sell what you need, negotiate a deal, transfer the money and then things don’t always go as planned.

In an ideal situation, you find an honest seller who you send the money to, then you receive the item and continue the game. Everyone is happy.

The second situation, let’s call it “something went wrong”, you run into a scammer. Lucky you! You could be left with nothing, or better yet receive an item with completely different stats, worth a lot less than what you paid for. Afterwards, you feel annoyed, maybe ashamed that you got duped. What do you do after? Getting the money back is out of the question, so it’s often quite demoralising.

Side note: after digging into some forums about these kinds of transactions, I have found out that sellers have a big risk too. For instance, the situation when the seller sends the item first and gets scammed by the buyer.

If you think this is a rare occurrence (situation), the next part will blow you away. In reality, there are millions of fraudulent transactions happening across the globe. In 2019, around 10% of all player-to-player trades were scams, costing players around $6 billion in total!

What are the solutions?

• Continue buying and selling via the method above, at your own risk. But as you can see, it is not ideal option. Gamers are rarely willing to give away their money to scammers.
• You stop boosting your character. At most you can buy items in-game but you can’t use your money to do so (or if you can, it’s rarely worth it).

What about an alternative? What if you could make transactions through a secure platform that acts as an independent financial guarantor for these trades? A trusted middleman if you will.

This is where MySafeTrade.com comes in. This is how it works:

1. The buyer and the seller enter into a transaction on the platform.
2. The buyer transfers the money to a secure account, where it is kept until the buyer receives the goods.
3. The seller will only ship the item after the buyer has made full payment to the platform.
4. The buyer receives his item and confirms its receipt on the platform
5. The money is sent to the seller.

If players understand the importance of secure transactions, it will contribute to a healthier development of the gaming industry.

“Recently, there has been an increase in fraud in transactions between players in the gaming industry, and there is still no solution to this problem,” noted the famous Russian businessman Dmitry Arkhipov in March of this year. He is one of the most prestigious experts in the Russian computer games industry and the founder of Akella — one of the first Russian companies for the development and distribution of computer games.

It is always up to which option to choose when buying in-game items. However, if you don’t trust the buyer or seller and would like to minimize risks, it’s better to do a transaction through a secure platform. Don’t be afraid to offer this option to others, and always remember, honest people are not afraid of these kinds of platforms.