Cloned Merchant Profile, The Merchant Who Looked Exactly Like Someone I'd Trust
Same display name, same profile photo, same green Merchant badge I remembered from a trade three weeks earlier that had gone perfectly. I almost skipped my usual check entirely, recognizing someone felt like verifying them.
What stopped me was habit, not suspicion. I always open a profile before I open an order, no exceptions, and this time the exception nearly won. The "member since" date read six days. The merchant I actually remembered had been active for months, with a completion count in the thousands. This one had forty-one.
A profile photo and a display name cost nothing to copy. A badge, a completion history built order by order over months, that's the part that can't be cloned instantly, and it's also the part I'd almost stopped looking at, because the part that's free to fake was the part my memory latched onto first.
I opened a chat instead of an order, mentioned the earlier trade by date, and asked if he remembered it. Long pause. Then a generic reply about having "a lot of customers." The real merchant, I checked separately, had no record of that conversation at all.
Recognizing someone and verifying someone turned out to be two different skills, and I'd been quietly substituting one for the other for longer than I want to admit.
Escrow would have held the crypto regardless of which merchant I'd traded with, that part isn't the risk here. The risk was handing my trust to a photo before checking whether the history behind it belonged to the same person.
I don't know how many other "familiar" profiles I've traded with the same shortcut. Probably more than I'd like to count.
#binancep2pantoan @Binance Vietnam $BLUAI $GUA $BMT
Same display name, same profile photo, same green Merchant badge I remembered from a trade three weeks earlier that had gone perfectly. I almost skipped my usual check entirely, recognizing someone felt like verifying them.
What stopped me was habit, not suspicion. I always open a profile before I open an order, no exceptions, and this time the exception nearly won. The "member since" date read six days. The merchant I actually remembered had been active for months, with a completion count in the thousands. This one had forty-one.
A profile photo and a display name cost nothing to copy. A badge, a completion history built order by order over months, that's the part that can't be cloned instantly, and it's also the part I'd almost stopped looking at, because the part that's free to fake was the part my memory latched onto first.
I opened a chat instead of an order, mentioned the earlier trade by date, and asked if he remembered it. Long pause. Then a generic reply about having "a lot of customers." The real merchant, I checked separately, had no record of that conversation at all.
Recognizing someone and verifying someone turned out to be two different skills, and I'd been quietly substituting one for the other for longer than I want to admit.
Escrow would have held the crypto regardless of which merchant I'd traded with, that part isn't the risk here. The risk was handing my trust to a photo before checking whether the history behind it belonged to the same person.
I don't know how many other "familiar" profiles I've traded with the same shortcut. Probably more than I'd like to count.
#binancep2pantoan @Binance Vietnam $BLUAI $GUA $BMT