Hey,

this may have an easy answer, and has probably been asked a lot, but is a scam in a trade also a breach of existing (e.g. theft- or fraud-related) criminal laws that exist in the US or elsewhere?

Talking about trades that involve agreements made on this site about person 1 paying fg, person 2 promising an item and then 1 not sending whilst still getting the item. Or similar scenarios.

If it breaks laws - and not just site rules - do these cases get forwarded to the authorities once the SA section concludes there's sufficient evidence?



I know it's just pixels and this is more of a theoretical question.

This post was edited by TheOnlyDenny on Jul 22 2022 09:19am

No - the SA forum exists to mark bad traders as scammers, aid in recompense where possible and to raise awareness of potential scammers and known scammers, but no laws exist to govern the private trading of digital items with digital currencies.

Another side of the coin is that it’s likely near impossible to know who anyone is on websites, JSP does provide user verification which you can find more info on - but it’s also equally likely a scammer isn’t going to apply to become a verified member.

This post was edited by roflcakesII on Jul 22 2022 09:24am

Blizzard also has a disclaimer that in game items are property of blizzard.

This post was edited by obisent on Jul 22 2022 09:25am

I'm uncertain whether the highlighted part actually applies. I'd be sure I can have an agreement with someone about exchanging data for data (or arbitrary digital goods), something I could legally enforce if one party doesn't comply.

The problem is in the above other reply - you don’t own any of the in-game data/items

There are countries where people can be sued and/or go under jurisdiction for acts of online game scamming or hacking, namely Korea, Japan and China,
however those cases usually are made between the game publisher, the accused and the victim and does not involve a trading platform such as us.

There are many factors why even if we were to say report a scam to authorities that it'll be extremely difficult to prosecute a scammer, one being we have users from all around the world and each country has their own law against digital scams and specifically ones that do not involve monetary transactions,
two we're not officially affiliated with the publishers of the games that we offer trading on, we simply offer a platform to facilitate trading.

By all means, here @ jsp staff do their best to make sure scams do not occur within our community and we do harshly punish scammers as well as offer them a chance to repay their scams, we encourage using a mediator service and we have plenty mediators from all timezones around the globe, also it has been stated clearly in the forum rules that illegal activity such as trades involving contraband and such will NOT be tolerated.

This post was edited by Lionhearted on Jul 22 2022 09:42am

It doesn't work that way such things are rare. Because it's hard to track such a person with fluctuating IP and VPN programs these days. Even when such cases go to the authorities or the police, they take years.

As I've mentioned in my post, a lot of countries don't have laws against internet trade scams where virtual items don't have actual monetary value, note monetary value is what your local authorities deem have monetary value and not what you perceive has monetary value.

Also to note, using a VPN to browse this site is illegal.
Extract from post #16 by Kevin: https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=81247844