jekanator banned

If anyone was in the midst of making a purchase from him, let me know and I can supply his email address so that you can conclude the transaction.

He was banned for cross-posting adverts on other websites.

This is normally something I warn about, but there were a number of complaints too about the provenance of items, the USD pricing, the demands to perform a money transfer to a Ukraine bank, refusal to use PayPal (I understand it's not available in Ukraine, but escrow services are available). Enough concerns raised by enough people that alarm bells were already ringing.

That's enough complaints and concerns that my usual "warn first, ban later" became "ban first, deal with fallout".

So if anyone does have a transaction in progress, let me know and I'll pass along his email.

I just want to share my experience with blocked user from Ukraine (jekanator). Few days ago he sent me a Sugino 75 with tracking number that seems legit.

He was very polite during our correspondence. He did say he couldn't receive money via PayPal (quick googling says this is true) and suggested bank transfer. He also suggested I check his previous sales and contacts in order to establish his legitimacy.

However, for a couple of days, he could not pick up the money I sent him (transaction was apparently frozen by Western Union) so he advised me that I cancel the transaction. I sent a request to WU to cancel my transaction, in the meantime, money was unfrozen, he picked it up and few days ago, apparently, sent the package with tracking number.

edit: I'm not sure about the provenance of items, but the reason for price currency used is Western Union automatically converting any currency sent to USD.

But he broke the forum rules. Kill him.

I'm not here to defend him, I just wanted to share my experience.

Yeah, he broke the rules. And I banned rather than warned because of the signal of trust.

We have a basis for a high degree of trust when we know a person from the real world, or they've built up a solid history of posts on the forum, and we recognise their face, and their interactions are good, etc.

But when we are dealing with international people, with no forum history, selling items with payment channels that offer no buyer protection, when the sourcing of items is questionable, when the person is located in a geographical location that has recently seen a disproportionate amount of fraud and stolen goods originating from there... then the trust is near zero.

Trust does matter, and is hard to quantify, but when factored in I personally think that I put this community who actually meet and contribute above those where the trust is low or non-existent.

Someone needs to make the calls and I'm trying to keep them as consistent as possible so that at least people can predict what's going to happen and it's not filled with any personal bias on my part. If the transactions he proposed didn't look fraudulent (direct bank transfer), or sound fishy with regards to the sourcing of the product on offer (hey, you asked for this and I've mysteriously been able to source it a day later at half the retail cost)... then we'd be in a different place, but we aren't.

So that question of "warn or ban" fell on the ban side.