I recently found this bit of feedback on AlphaBay and found it quite strange. I had kept it to myself because I thought somebody else was going to step forward with more information but no one has.
https://anonfiles.com/file/3a6d2870cf7057544622e026041423e1
This bit of feedback is alarming because of the date. "Jan 1, 1970". For those of you playing along at home, no, AlphaBay was not created in 1970 (duh) and there would be no way for a user to leave a specified date on feedback.
The only way this feedback makes sense to me is that it was manipulated by staff / admin and they messed up forgetting to change the date to a current one. It is alarming to see this feedback because it means AlphaBay could very likely be padding the feedback of certain vendors while hurting other vendors feedback in an attempt to corral buyers to specific vendors.
The vendors who's page this was on has since been banned but to my knowledge he has been a reliable vendor since SR1 days and has always reached out to customers to make things right.
Why would AlphaBay care what vendors get business over other ones? Well they could have a deal with certain vendors for extra %, they could run their own vendor pages and selectively scam while removing negative feedback, they could set up full on scammer accounts themselves and add all the postive feedback they want and then come to the rescue and close down those "scammer" profile after reddit has blown the whistle. The possiblities go on and on for how this could be abused and I'm sure those playing along at home can come up with a few good ideas.
This is alarming and should never be the case with any market. The potential for abuse with this is huge and it should be looked at carefully.
This type of feedback manipulation becomes even more interesting when you talk about the fact that AlphaBay is the only market to set up a "Scam watch team" and esspecially when that team is huge dicks to everybody and AlphaBay has one of the largets presence of scammers. If I wanted to get away with scamming people on a marketplace I too would put into place a team to make it look like I was trying to stop scammers.
I am interested to hear the communities thoughts on this. I would also love to hear Trappy and alphabay try to explain how feedback got posted in 1970.
Yes I realize that screenshots are not the best way to capture things because they can be manipulated but it is what I have and I am willing to put my reputtion on the line showing it to all of you. I am not suggesting you go check out X, Y or Z market because, "they are amazing and would never do such a thing". I just am brining to light very suspect actions by AlphaBay. Everyone should still do their research when picking markets and decied themselves which one is the safest, most secure, and reliable.
It used to be a small glitch in the display where this date was displayed for an order later refunded, but it was fixed 2 weeks ago.