october i was approached by a high school student the butterfly ruby heat unboxed now a butterfly ruby is a very valuable knife particularly if you're in high school you can do a lot with that and luckily it's also the sort of skin traders love to buy now on the chinese marketplace buff NUMBER_TOKEN it was worth six thousand four hundred dollars at the time so i offered him my standard cash rate which was ninety percent of the buff price five thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars we agreed on that price i gave him my trade link and asked for payment details he said he'd do it when he was back from school and then he went silent now getting ghosted is pretty common when you're doing a cash trade someone will change their mind at last minute but they don't have to go back and tell you no because it's you know it's awkward it's uncomfortable and so just go silent which is understandable and i don't really think about it that much when it happens because it just does sometimes but NUMBER_TOKEN days later i got another message from him it turned out he'd been scammed and was understandably pretty upset about it now he was hoping i could try and scam the scammer for him i wasn't going to do that scare me a scammer is still scamming you will get steamrock banned it'll be a permanent stain on your reputation no one will ever trust you again and by the way that scammer is going to run around claiming he bought it legit but the thing that quickly started to worry me was that stories like these weren't unusual they were common i was coming across a lot of them i'd make a deal with someone they'd go quiet for a bit and then they'd come back and tell me they got scammed and i knew from talking to other traders that they seen this a lot too and almost every single time there's a common thread tying these scams together the price the scammers were offering this is another example somebody approached me for a price check on the desert hydra i told him its current price and a week later he messaged me about an offer he got it now the moment i checked that price i knew it was a scam but by that point it was already too late and these prices that the scammers are offering are central to their scams it is how they get people but at the same time it also gives them away if you know what the skin is worth most of the time you instantly know whether or not you're dealing with a scammer just based on the price they offer the only problem is how do you know what your skin is actually worth if you're selling to a cash trader well that's the exploit most people don't know not because they're dumb but because it's confusing and i'm going to explain what scammers are doing to get people here
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