jekanator banned

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.