Getting scammed sucks. Simply said it can ruin someones day, or even week if it is a big scam. You lost stuff you worked hard for, and it can really ruin your experience. Here are some tips against scams. First off, a scammer will always try to use one of your emotions against you, almost always the same one, greed. Almost always a scammer will make you want something badly, so badly that you do not notice some of the red flags. Why? because greed causes tunnel vision and impatience, two things that make you very susceptible to scams. When trading, always try to think Is this deal too good to be true? If the answer is yes, then try to clear your head, and think of the trade as a scam. Don't discontinue the trade, but assume it is the worst case scenario, this will put you on guard, make you have patience, and you will not fall for a scam as easily. You won't be impatient, you will always be looking to see how he is trying to scam you, and if it is not a scam, the trade will go through, however if it is a scam, it is highly unlikely you will fall for it. Here are some examples of scams people using this, lets analyse them a little: The first one is a simple "game" where the scammer is trying to overpay at a very fast speed, you can see him "give" 222m instead of 120, but cancel very fast, after a couple of times the seller wont think and will accidentally accept a trade when the scammer reduced the meso amount. We can easily see here that it alerts every red flag there is, he is overpaying a lot, making you greedy, and then he is using your impatience to try to scam you into accepting by mistake a bad offer. The next one is also very similar, we can see someone trying to sell a 22 attack glove for 1.4b, this is a very good deal, however when inspecting close you can see its not a glove, but a low level knuckle. A played seeing 22 attack might get impatient and quickly buy it before seeing it is actually a low level weapon. One last one to look at, is this one. We can see here that someone is selling zombie teeth for a reasonable price, a stack of 200 for 1.4m, but then you can see that he hides there 1 for 1.4m, if someone makes a mistake he might buy 200 for 1.4m each, scamming them for 280 mil, not the cheapest teeth I have seen. Same method as before, using impatience and being unaware against you. We can see that they all follow the same pattern, offering a good deal, all is good in the start, however later he uses impatience to scam you. However not all scams will do that. Some scams will simply require you to trust them. Similar to leech, you pay without knowing if he might run away with your money. There is no real way to counter this besides being patient, if someone wants you to trust them, they need to be trustworthy. All in all, scams can be very easy to see if you are patient, spend an extra minute or so making sure the trade is safe, it wont do you any harm.
Extra examples How to know if it's a trade scam : 1. Level . Trade scammers tend to be level <120 as scamming on high level characters would get them blacklisted from boss / leech . 2. Meso amount . You told him 100 mil but the dude put 222 mil , double the amount then canceling trade to retrade again . Clearly a scam and fake as nobody would give an amount that is not even close to the amount asked by mistake (Unless a missing or extra zero 0 ). 3. Name . Seen the scammer's name in smega about them scamming ? Better think twice.
Good initiative to write this. I have thankfully never been scammed, because even before scamming was this big of an issue (way back when maple was still relatively new), I always checked if the price is correct, items are correct and so on before accepting anything. Yes, sometimes you may have to take your time with the trades and maybe even cancel and find someone else to trade with, but it's worth it when I don't get screwed over.
I have also never been scammed in mapleroyals, I have however in other games once, costing me a lot of money sadly.
Nice! Would be cool to add that new scam where the guy opens a shop with the wrong item and pressure you to buy it with a fake alt that a guy posted at discussion. Also, while I agree most scammers are low level(Like <20) there are a lot of people that use mules to hold items and money and to merch in general, so not everyone low level trader is a scammer, but together with other evidence it becomes a thing to be suspicious about.
