Re: Beta testing Enthusify as a new Marketplace platform
I would be interested in knowing what the reason for considering a move to replace the current marketplace is. Certainly there is a catalyst for this.
Excellent question, voiced in different ways by several people.
I obviously failed to appeciate the huge disconnect between my view of the existing Marketplace system and the general site membership's view of it. This is probably because I deal with the problems all the time, while most people rarely if ever have a problem, and have only a very limited subset of transactions on which to base their view of how well it works.
So what is wrong? Several things. But first and foremost, and all I am going to focus on in this lengthy post, is that a lot of people are getting ripped off. I don't mean just buyer disputes, or someone's description was misleading, or even the occasional flake who took money and didn't deliver. I mean real criminal scams where multiple NSX owners are taken for thousands of dollars each, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a pop in some cases.
This type of scam is new on this site within the last few years. The really concerning part is that the rate at which this happens has been increasing quite a bit for the last 1 - 2 years.
The other big issue is stolen / chopped NSXs. I suspect most owners would be shocked to know how many stolen NSXs are being parted out. I never would have expected it for such a low-volume niche car either, but the reality is I've dealt with a LOT of stolen NSXs being parted out, and I know I haven't caught them all. Unlike the other scam, this has been pretty steady over the years with occasional spikes.
It really pisses me off when someone uses my website to scam fellow NSX owners or sell parts from someone's stolen NSX. When I suspect it, I spend a lot of time trying to do something about it. If often takes 10 or 20 hours to thoroughly investigate and piece everything together. I am often sorting through hundreds of emails and PMs, trying to contact dozens of people and keep track of responses from each one, ask anyone who actually sent money a bunch of questions to get a dozen little pieces of info I can piece together to figure out the identify of the person behind it, etc.
The frequency has increased to the point where I'm probably averaging 10 hrs a month now doing all that. Some of them get "busted," but the reality is that property crimes are not a priority for most major metro police departments, and the victims are always far away. Federal law enforcement doesn't really care about most small-time operators.
The good news is that in most cases, by acting quickly I've been able to help a lot of people recover most or all of their money. Sometimes my email asking about their deal with a scammer is the first sign people have that something is awry.
The bad news is twofold: First, some people don't recover all, or even any, of their money for various reasons. Second, this system is simply not sustainable: I don't have the time for what it has beome, and it has only been steadily increasing. I'm not going to continue skipping dinner because someone's ad raised a red flag and when I looked a little closer I didn't like what I saw and so now it's a big project where time is of the essence and if I wait until the next day it may be too late.
There are several other issues with the current Marketplace setup, which I guess I can go into another time if anyone really cares, but none of them are as critial as this one.
Now there are various ways I could try and solve this problem. Here are a few I've thought of, along with the reasons I have dismissed them.
Idea: Charge people to post in the Marketplace. Fatal flaw: A lot of these scammers have control of a legitimate verified PayPal account before they post their scam ads, which is one reason buyers are confident in sending them money. So if they are looking to take thousands of dollars from people, I really do not believe it will deter them to pay whatever nominal fee I could reasonably charge legitimate people to post an ad.
Idea: Require some sort of proof of ownership or identity. Fatal flaw 1: I'm not a government agency so I can't verify the accuracy of info. Maybe the effort of doing it would deter some people but at that point why don't I just have people write an essay. Fatal flaw 2: I don't want to be responsible for securing legitimate people's personal info. Fatal flaw 3: It would be enormously intrusive, and I wouldn't participate in a forum using such a system myself.
Idea: Try to help members protect themselves by publishing tips and strongly encourage people to be more cautious. Fatal flaw: I've tried everything I can think of, from a great "How to Protect Yourself in Marketplace Transactions" document written by another member, to warnings in the rules, to just hoping people would generally become savvier to online scams as more people had more experiene online. Fatal flaw: Despite all that, the rate at which the scams are occuring has steadily increased.
So what I'm looking for is either an idea I haven't had yet, or a way to integrate some level of buyer protection into the system itself. A plugin like Enthusify addresses the integrated protection because it offers two things:
First, as soon as an item is bought, the listing closes. Anyone listing a transmission six times is going to get spotted right away. Major problem solved: No more taking money from half a dozen people for the same fake listing.
Second, it offers a actual escrow service. Through helping people who have been scammed I've learned that there are a lot of holes in relying on PayPal buyer protection as the only safety net for members. An escrow service isn't perfect, but it's probably as good as we can reasonably achieve. It also adds a time buffer so that if I do need to investigate something I have a few days and don't have to put everything else in my life aside with no notice on a monthly basis, which I am not really willing to continue doing as often as I have been for the last year or so.
As someone else said, you don't hear about this stuff much because most people don't go around announcing they got scammed. Unlike a normal buyer/seller dispute, by the time buyers know it's a scam the account has already been banned and they are just trying to get their money back if possible. I haven't gone out of my way to talk about it because it didn't seem to serve much purpose. I'm pretty confident the same is happening on other forums but most admins probably don't see much use in discussing it either, and on the bigger forums it probably isn't even possible to keep up with it. I find more than half of them out because I don't like the way something looks and start investigating - the buyers don't even know they've been scammed unti I contact them. Oh a huge forum with hundreds of classified ad threads active every day there is no way to keep up with it all. This is a completely unintended benefit of the 1-month bump rule on this site; the reduced post activity in the Marketplace makes it easier to keep up with new listings.
I like the potential of Enthusify's platform but as I have said I'd like to see some changes to the fee structure before I'd entirely switch over to it. However I am not married to them, I have just given them some feedback and agreed to install the beta. So if you have an idea for a way to INTEGRATE some useful level of real buyer protection into the classified section - and by that I mean the DEFAULT needs to be that buyers are opted in to protection - I am more than happy to investigate it. Keep in mind that any such service is pretty much guaranteed to cost something because it costs money to provide such a service.
I do not propose that everyone should start paying a fee lightly - I know that ultimately it is coming out of the pockets of the NSX community of which I am a member and in which I have many friends. But I am OK with everyone paying a few extra % if it will greatly reduce a smaller number of people being seriously ripped off. I realize not everyone will agree with this, but I am not going to continue things like they are indefinitely, because while it may work fine for 95% of the time, the other 5% is not acceptable to me. If no acceptable solution exists that will integrate with the forum, I will seriously consider closing the Marketplace entirely until I can find a satisfactory solution to address this problem.
