I'm proud to announce a new service to help build trust with virtual buyers and sellers. The biggest problem with the Internet is it's ability to give people a high degree of anonymity. Being anonymous on the Internet allows a lot of people to do things they would not do if they were face to face with other people.
At one of my sites that supports World of Warcraft we have an account trading forum. ( Link: http://www.markeedragon.com/u/ubbthreads/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/worldofwarcraftaccounttrading ) It's a very busy forum with 80 to 100 accounts posted a day that people want to buy sell or trade. The biggest issue in the forum is that people are getting scammed. Since everyone is pretty much anonymous it allows scammers to sore with a few people before they get negative feedback and then no one will deal with them. Then they just sign up a new account in the forums and start over again. It's really been very frustrating because nothing has worked to stop them. For those of you that instantly think that we should ban them. We've tried. Does not work. They just come back under a different name.
So the quest has been for that forum to some how reduce the scamming. I figured that if we reduce the level of anonymity that we can increase the trust between traders and get more honest transactions. So I have been working on developing a solution to this issue. Knowing that our forum and sales sites are not the only places that have this issue we came up with the following service.
Trust Who Will offer a paid service of ID verification. We are going to provide evidence of verification to potential buyers, sellers and traders. Here's what will be verified:
Paypal email address.
Paypal confirmed shipping address.
IP geographical tracking to the origin of the purchase of the service.
Telephone number verification.
We will actually talk to everyone over the phone and have a few questions for them.
Once a person passes this they will be given a link to a page on our site that will show the following:
Confirmed Email address (This is the key that everyone will use if you want to see if it is really them. People checking to verify the identity will be told to send an email and wait for a verification reply to confirm they are dealing with them.)
Real Name
We will list that their telephone number, shipping address and IP location match without showing the details to the public.
We will describe what this all means and give instructions on how to verify that you are dealing with this person. We will also show contact information so that law enforcement agencies can contact us with requests for the information we have verified.
For each person who has done the verification they will be given code for adding a text link or graphics showing that they have been ID verified by Trust Who. People will be able to display this on their sites or forum signatures.
We will promote this service to all of our traders and suggest to all of them that they do not buy, sell or trade with someone that has not been verified. Trading with people who have been verified will reduce your chances of being scammed does to about 1%. Right now by our best estimates up to 15% of the transactions currently happening are currently experiencing fraud issues of one sort or another.
We have one of our programmers working on the server side code for this right now. We expect to release this service to the public about March 1st 2006. We are not doing this to make money. We are doing it to reduce the fraud and scamming we see going on. the cost for this service will be only $5.
We do also plan to include a service very much like this for businesses. We will verify businesses and we will also offer a search system so that sellers can verify that someone has a verified ID status with us via a lookup on their paypal email address.
I'm really looking forward to this. Trust Who has been very successful in the reduction of customer fraud with the big virtual items sellers. Now we can bring these same benefits to the general public as well.
Marcus Eikenberry
Markee Dragon LLC
Edited by MarkeeDragon (01/28/06 11:32 AM)
