Marketplace Safe Trading

Safe Trading While we want the safest possible environment for trades, the reality is that Hack Forums is not always a safe place to conduct business. To minimize the risk of dealing in our marketplace, we recommend following these steps before dealing with someone on this forum. Use the Search Feature to search the UID & name of the member you are planning to deal with. If someone made a community alert/deal dispute against the member, you'll be able to find it. Check the Deal Dispute Database for any (open) deal disputes made against the member you are planning to deal with. If you've purchased a site upgrade, check the Trust Scan of the member you are planning on dealing with. While it shouldn't be the deciding factor on whether to deal with someone or not, it's very useful to see if an account looks legitimate and secure, or if it looks shady. ALWAYS use Contracts! Contracts are there for your safety, as well as the rest of the Hack Forums community. Use them to make sure everything is well documented in the event you need to dispute the deal. Check the Market Profile of the user you're planning to deal with. A market profile contains all Contracts a user has made on Hack Forums, as well as their Business Rating (B-Rating). You can also find a redirect to the deal disputes if there are any on a user. Use Common sense! This is by far the most important thing to remember. If something looks/sounds too good to be true, it probably is! If you get scammed and seller wants you to close the dispute DO NOT close it until you're satisfied with the outcome. More info here. What is UID and how I can find it? A user id (UID) is a unique identifier for each member on the forum. When you navigate to someone's profile page, the link you see in your browser is something like hackforums.net/member.php?action=profile&uid=129349. The 129349 is the UID of that member. Methods of communication At HF we offer a few ways to communicate with members. One is Private Message system and the other is Conversation system. We highly recommend using official methods of communication as they are on-site, once sent they cannot be altered at all and you know who are you talking to. Messages in Conversation cannot be deleted. If one party deletes his messages in PM system, the other party still has it. Also, we offer an option to export PMs and Convos. Dangers of using off-site communication Members often resort to using off-site communication services such as Discord, Telegram, Skype, etc. Main drawback of these services is that you can't know for sure who are you talking to. There are many impersonators posing as (highly reputed) sellers from HF and many members fall for it when they get contacted on Discord for example. Usernames (handles) on some off-site services such as Discord can be faked and they can look like the username (handle) a member put in their signature or sales thread. Also, some platforms allow messages to be edited and/or deleted. Here are some red flags when using off-site communication: A person wants the deal to be very quick. They might rush you and want you to send the goods first. A person wants the deal to be done without a HF contract. A person refuses to do verification via PMs or Convos on HF. There are always risks when doing deals online. That's why we highly recommend using on-site PMs and Convos to communicate. At least you know who are you talking to. That's one less risk to deal with.