At the time of the TM M4 sale I gave him a few options, I said he could either go ahead with the sale, whereby if he was found to be scamming he would have his account deleted. Or, he could mark all the items as sold and we'd close all his sales threads and say nothing more about it, whilst also closely monitoring his activity, whereby we'd delete him should he try and sell anything again.
Rather confusingly, whilst I was talking about to M4 sale to him, I noticed that there was a Glock 18 sale of his that had recently been locked because it was sold. With no complaints getting back to us, so either he's a very randomly selective scammer, not a scammer and he's just got problems understanding people, or he marked the items as sold, to make himself look more legit... It's probably the latter and he was trying to outsmart us.
But yeah, so we gave him a fair and fighting chance, but it looks like he chose the wrong path, it has led to someone being scammed and for that I humbly apologise, it's just that we can't ban people on a whim because 1 or 2 people have suspicions without any hard evidence.
Through the sales threads he was also linked to another one or two accounts, which had different names but kept cloning all his sales posts, we did some digging and found them to be confirmed scammers on both Steam and ZeroIn, so we banned them immediately.
The Realist however, had been an active member for a while, and I do recall seeing posts made by him elsewhere, outside of the classifieds, suggesting he wasn't here to scam people, otherwise why would he contribute at all? This is why I gave him the option to mark all his sales as sold so I could lock them, because I assumed the threat of being banned would actually matter to him. Apparently not.
It was a funny case, but it seems like all the accounts must've all been linked and used from different locations to avoid sharing the same IP.
Either way, it's either been resolved already, or shortly will be by Dev and that leaves me with little else to say, other than sorry to mec, for suffering a scamming and that we couldn't Sherlock Holmes the guy off the forums before he had the opportunity to do any damage at all.
To The Realist, if you're reading - Shame. On. You. It's people like you that make people paranoid about second hand sales and ironically, that paranoia leads others into scamming people, to scam before they are scammed, which would never happen to anyone if arseholes like you didn't take advantage of the insecure grounds which are forums' classifieds threads.
It's not a good cycle and it bodes badly for the hobby, we will stamp it flat when we find it.
Also, thanks go out to you guys, mec and kev, for reporting him.
