Silk Road forums

Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: d29sps3mj9sl on August 07, 2012, 12:21 am

Title: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: d29sps3mj9sl on August 07, 2012, 12:21 am
Ok I'm new here but not new to all this cloak and dagger stuff.   The reputation system for buyers and sellers seems to have major problems.

The purpose of such a system is to make it as expensive as possible for fakers/infomants/scammers to obtain and retain the appearance of honest entities, without inconveniencing the honest gals/blokes to excess.

But frankly it would be easy right now to set up fake accounts that get a high rating and appear just as legitimate as the honest entity's accounts.  Even as compared with, for example, eroids.com.

The obvious main things wrong with it are a)the feedback sections fail to allow you to check out the individuals who left the ratings.  They could all be fake, easily, as far as the viewer can tell.  Obviously there are problems with both sharing the id of the rater and also the item the purchased.   However there is not any real reason to share the item they purchased.  The rough dollar (btc) amount maybe but that is it.

This is about establishing the legitimacy of the entities, the traders, not about how good their ketamine or whatever is.

b)the buy/sell activity is itsself too easy to fake.  People should be encouraged to have the same ID on the SR as on the forums, perhaps by making it the default and also of course prohibiting anyone from taking the username of a seller/buyer on the forum unless they use exactly the same password as on SR.    Forum activity is much much harder to fake than buy/sell activity.  The forum activity should be leveraged in this way.    Anyone who wants to opt-out, using a different account for the forum could do so.

Right now SR apparently uses essentially a numerical rating sytem, based on the number and size of ratings buyers/sellers give, which is very flimsy.

Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: IAmMeaty on August 07, 2012, 01:36 am
I think this would counter the whole point of sr, i dont really want people spying on me or what i buy from sellers home pages... you do realize your talking about freely sharing buyer history. Buyer seller confidentiality my friend.
Anyway a scammer buying a seller account then setting up a few buyer accounts to create feedback can only take them so far what are they going to do wait for their first purchase then run off?

Despite all of this new vendors create feedback/review threads + give out samples to gain trust initially and established vendors ..well their established..
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: BulkChemBuyer on August 07, 2012, 03:19 am
OP is right.

It would be pretty easy for someone to set up an account, make a bunch of fake sales (you could theoretically get 300+) for like $1 each, and then get people to finalize early on a "great bulk deal" that you have.

Unfortunately, the upside of tor/btc/SR also creates the downside.

Someone can very easily set up an entire fake empire. 20+ forum accounts, reviews all over the place. All from one person.

Let's say you do 300 "sample" sales to yourself at $1 each. That's a total of $45 (plus the $150 for the seller account) to get yourself up to 100% positive reviews with 300+ transactions. More than enough to fool some people into FEing on big orders.

This is why I will never finalize early.
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: d29sps3mj9sl on August 07, 2012, 02:30 pm
I think this would counter the whole point of sr, i dont really want people spying on me or what i buy from sellers home pages... you do realize your talking about freely sharing buyer history. Buyer seller confidentiality my friend.
Anyway a scammer buying a seller account then setting up a few buyer accounts to create feedback can only take them so far what are they going to do wait for their first purchase then run off?

Despite all of this new vendors create feedback/review threads + give out samples to gain trust initially and established vendors ..well their established..

No, I said there is no need to share the actual items, did I not?  I think that, for example, sharing only the dollar (btc) value of the transactions would make more sense.   I really don't care what Bob bought, only how well the transaction went and maybe the size of it.  And adding the actual item doesn't make it much harder to fake as far as I can tell.  Someone who wanted to set up a fake account would already have to list a bunch of fake stuff to form a realistic list of offerings.  Since the same ads are repeated, it makes no extra work to place a few of those fake ads in your reputational history as having been completed.

But anyway, the bottom line is the stuff about cost to the fakers vs. the legit people.  I'm not saying I have a complete solution, but starting with understanding how the current system is unacceptably bad and frankly dangerous, is a good start.
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: mahalo on August 07, 2012, 02:58 pm
the item can be viewed right next to the feedback a buyer gives. so you always know if its 300 1g orders or bulk orders.
skimming through the feedback in the actual SR marketplace is by far not enough. there are actually sellers whose feedback pages read nothing but "FE, FE, FE, FE...." thats pointless.
Checking the forum next to SR is essential. Ideally a good seller will have a review thread where he is announcing/posting himself regularly to ensure for buyers he is still there. I always search the seller's username in the forum search as well to see what kind of dude he is. That eliminates a lot of ppl for me. Dont see a problem with the current rating system if you approach it like I said. Just relying on the feedback scores and phrases cant be recommended in the first place.
In an anonymous environment, of course you will have the downside to the anonymity creating such problems. Thats why you never impulse buy, but check every source available to see who your seller is. no FEing also helps a lot to prevent any scams. Dunno if the attempt to make the system more transparent will lead to losing its most important purpose of anonymity eventually.
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: lefthandspinner on August 07, 2012, 03:09 pm
they changed it 1 time and hid the item and it was annoying as fuck and was changed back rapid

u didnt know if the reviews were for the guys coke or h what use is that when his coke could be great and the h shit without the item it was shit

feedback is faked for sure but u aint going to get to 20 never mind 300 without other non related accounts ordering so u would need to cancel all there orders or have product

u could deffo make it easier for scammers though by hiding item and then we couldnt tell if its all lotteries or actual product and someone could get to 300 buying a listing no one ever would see  and then start listing h saying hes just moving into that market and we would have no way of knowing what hes sold to get to 300
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: Tunbear on August 07, 2012, 03:31 pm
Yes but if you're planning on buying an item that has a higher value then the listing itself only lists feedback for that item, and not other items they have had feedback for.
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: lefthandspinner on August 07, 2012, 03:50 pm
yes u right i carnt remember  why  but im sure i didnt like it when item wasnt there ,

without item  or with bit value instead  they could list an item that others wouldnt see or buy (car etc) and just buy it loads  of times and when he turns up selling h he might have 500k / 300 sales  and look like a top vendor moving into h  require FE and people would play thinking well hes got 300 sales but it means nothing coz u dont know what he was meant to of sold so carnt check weather he has been selling or not  and when item was just hidden  they could have 300 and it could be 300 free listings

to make real money from the scam u need to actually be a real vendor for a while other wise even with fake feedback u wont get that many sales before the 1/5 come
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: d29sps3mj9sl on August 07, 2012, 04:37 pm
It doesn't even have to be $1 transactions that are used as the fake transactions for someone to fake their history/ratings with... they can just make normal sized transactions, since they are the same person paying as collecting the money, all it costs them is whatever commission on the trades, which is peanuts to law enforcement.

 Indeed LE is my main concern.  The quantity of normal criminal scamming happening should at least be more or less visible, and worst case scenario you loose some $ and adapt.  But the number of people being attacked by LE as a result of fake seller accounts actually set up by the fuzz may not even be very accurately known to us. 

I think it is not right at all to assume that what makes SR good - a separation from our "main" pubilc social identifiers, sometimes called the "real" ones, which I think is inaccurate, as if our other names were not just as useful in their own contexts - does not necessarily bring the problems that we see.

"real" social identities are just so prized because they are supposedly hard to fake.  Suppose there was some lala land where something like SR existed where you were supposed to use your real name and address.  Oh, like ebay.  You'd never get any scammers there right? ;-).  The main reason you can't sell illegal stuff on ebay is the same reason you can't sell assasinations on SR - the curators will take the ad down or ban your account.  Not ID requirements.  I bet you can access ebay through a tor proxy.

 A long history of posting on the forums for instance, may be even harder to fake, yet easy for me to verify by having a look. I suggest you check out a site like eroids.com (which is far from perfect, mind) to see how this goes.  For anyone who has left a review on a source, for instance.  Looking at their forum history, it would clearly require a lot of investment - cost a lot - to make all the posters look as different as they do, yet know what they do about bodybuilding.   But on SR many people use a different username on the forum than the road per se so you often can't check.  People should be able to do this if they want of course, but imo should be encouraged as mentioned above to use the same names.

You would have to pay a lot of different and quite knowledgeable people to spend an awful lot of time posting on that forum, especially to make things look realistic, which would be a relatively expensive enterprise.  And big, meaning hard to hide.  Doesn't make in impossible, but you see the system makes it more expensive to fake the appearance of genuine, discrete, human entities acting in good faith. 

However there are of course still ways to corrupt things, especially if the site admins are in on it, as they are rumoured (fairly strongly) to be; delete bad reviews of your friends, and systematicaly silence complains that the people will therefore try to post on the site's forum.  Then the complaints pop up on unrelated bodybuilding forums, though, so I can still check the legitimacy of the site itsself at least a little by googling it.  Obviously if the feds are involved they might tamper with google or other forums further complicating things, but even for the feds that would be a significant undertaking, and you'd think if they did that sort of thing  as a habit it might be on our radar at least a bit, instead of sounding like a fantastic conspiracy...

Obviously there are privacy implications with linking the SR usernames with forum usernames, but it's just an example of a better system not saying it's an answer right there...
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: Tunbear on August 07, 2012, 04:49 pm
Didn't realize that, might do it myself ;)

Quick edit your post before anyone else realizes!
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: d29sps3mj9sl on August 07, 2012, 04:51 pm
Huh? but left, why would he not just make fake h listings and buy and sell those instead, then?  Making a fake fake buy/sell of a car listing is no easier than an h listing.

However I could see the problem of someone selling lotteries or trinkets or something, and then one day moving into h to scam people with their acrued rating.  However the quantity of money the transactions were, rather than the contents of them, would seem to handle that aspect pretty well.

If someone was in fact handling large amounts of money every day while selling legal trinkets, then yes that is IMO a legitimate reason to trust that they will not walk off with your money when selling you h.  Business is business.  I would consider selling people crap h, at least over a significant time, to be essentially the same as walking off with some fraction of the cash in people's faces. 

If they were just getting into the game and did not know their h was crap, then their ratings would dip, some buyers would be miffed, but they would either clean up their act and repent in due course or they would go out of business due to poor ratings as people kept rating them according to the quality of the business transaction they experienced.

I still don't see much opportunity to scam opened up by concealing the item *contents*.  The value should suffice, and then pseudoID of the buyer could be shared, allowing the legitimacy of the rating they leave to be evaluated, preventing the problem of a large number of fake accounts being used to jack ratings as easily.
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: masterblaster on August 08, 2012, 12:07 am
i brought this up in the feature requests forum. To fhix this you gotta put a link next to the review with the reviewers history. Since no one knows who the reviewer is it doesnt compromise anyones security.

http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=33584.0
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: d29sps3mj9sl on August 08, 2012, 05:58 pm
To me, this is not a feature request.  When I say deeply flawed I mean deeply flawed.  The system should not be like this in the first place.  If things are what they appear, then it is a serious mistake to do things this way, not a lack of features. 

It's about doing things differently, not a feature addition.  They chose to do things they way they did instead of some alternate path for some reason.
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: johnthebaptiste on August 22, 2012, 06:14 am
You bring up some hella good points in here. It's funny because I've been somewhat anxious awaiting an order but my only risk is losing 50% of my purchase price...which I understood as a risk and if someone was scamming that wouldn't be smart because it's a relatively small amount.

It is scary to think LE could make a large seemingly legit vendor and collect info but I'd assume their interest would really pertain to the distribution/seller side. Not to say that people don't purchase large amounts here and turn around to re-sell...I would never use the road for anything beyond personal purchases but that's your own judgement. Long time vendors would be very difficult to fake but there is quite a bit of business from vendors with a few month history it seems.

There really seems to be no way to prevent LE setting up buyers and over a long term making buys and becoming trusted clients (ie: Farmer's Market bust) but that ultimately can only take down a single large seller and takes a long time and significant resources.

The rating system is imperfect for sure but difficult to improve too much without sacrificing anonymity and protection for vendors. It's sad but I actually feel better seeing my seller having a couple of not perfect issues in the review and forum, although mostly good feedback. Not LE...

There are no shortage of people that overly trust the system though and it amazes me how carelessly they will be with large amounts of cash on early finalizations. I see a vendor get good rep here and in forums then do a "weekend special" requiring FE for a deal that should set off alarms (too good to be true) and say they require FE due to high demand and can't tie up that much investment in escrow...too many buyers goto auto finalize blah blah and they may scam thousands and then just switch to a new vendor account. Suppose that's the buyers fault but it's happening more and more often it seems and can go on for a while with fake forum accounts/reviews and is impossible to prevent without losing anonymity. Guess that's the risk of the road?

I think the feedback of older userid's being relatively more valuable is the best idea presented though...
Title: Re: The reputaion system appears to be deeply flawed
Post by: Tunbear on August 25, 2012, 12:01 am
Yeah it's amazing how many people get fucked over trusting a good deal...although it's worked out for me, because I do a special offer for a certain group of people (not going to say what because it will be very quickly abused), but it took ages for anyone to take advantage of it because they were convinced it was a con haha.

So I saved a shitload of money while trying to prove myself legit :D