That could also cause problems if someone gets compromised. I'd say a phone number to keep in contact with them at all times would be sufficient.
Might, as well just add Banned Reason: Scamming User #10200 (Laiteux) - Dispute #17585 Ban Ends: Never
Trusted =/= Official Middleman It's like Squares and Rectangles, all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. You can be trusted but not middleman (like Callum) but all people who are official middlemen would be trusted.
Very bad idea, especially for the liability of MCTrades legally. If they are going to appoint a 'verified middleman', and that 'verified middleman' ends up scamming, who is at fault? MCTrades, because they pushed the middleman to being 'oh so honest no scam!!!'. It adds too much liability on MCTrades, if these middleman did end up exit scamming. There is no way to prove someone is legit. People scam. I've seen people with 100+ rep scam. I've seen staff scam. (Not on this site but on other related forums). There is no feasable way to make someone a 'verified' or 'official' middleman. Let the users decide who they want to middleman, don't let MCTrades be legally accountable for it because they decided to advertise these people as: "Official Middleman. Don't wanna get scammed? Use these people!"
As Jerry stated, add something to the TOS stating MCT is not responsible. But choosing middlemen that wouldn't scam isn't very hard. As well as how Jerry said that the middlemen could offer a bit of collateral information to where if they did scam it would be out of their favor. You also don't have to use the word "official", there are plenty of other words that could suit it such as verified.
First off, thanks for the suggestion. We definitely gave it some thought, and here’s some points I’d like to make to all your responses: Should a middleman designated by MCTrades decide to exit scam, MCTrades will be held responsible. While a TOS clause would absolve us of any legal liabilities (as many of you have stated), the overall backlash it would create against our site would be horrendous. At the end of the day, we were the ones that determined that the individual was qualified to middleman your transaction, and to state otherwise would be blatantly lying. It would question the judgment of not only me, but my entire team. Please understand that “Trusted” individuals on sites like OGU have dealt with, on some occasions, millions of dollars. These people may be, and often are, legally recognized middlemen and escrow operators. If one of these individuals were to scam, they could face an actual legal backlash, something that very rarely happens on a Minecraft marketplace. And as some of you may have seen, there have actually been incidents of scams by “Trusted” users. What could that mean for a site where personal legal implications are basically nonexistent? With this in mind, I recognize that there are multiple individuals with elevated levels of reputation. However, I don’t feel comfortable handing over the ability to alter the reputation of my site to these users, nor will I in the foreseeable future. Moving this to declined; once again, thank you for the suggestion.