hello everyone
You guys do bring up a good point with the profiles, we struggled with this a long time ago, so let me give you some history behind this so you can see where we are now and how we got there.
As an open classified format we don't have a pinpointed buyer and seller to the site on any one given item. It's pretty much your local newspaper classified listing service, where someone calls, gives credit card info and posts an ad. There is no way for anyone to find out who really is on the other end or if that person is really going to scam someone.
Our site is a little different because we are free to people who want to use it for free, so we don't even get someone to call us or to give us any kind of payment, but we still have the same issues as the newspaper when it comes to finding out what someone is going to do on the other end.
We do not track sales so there is no way of knowing what was happening but because the Honor Payments were being made we knew that people were still successful in selling items long before any profiles were ever attached. But we still felt the site needed more, out came social networking and we made the RaceSpace for people who wanted to know more about the other person.
We cannot make the profiles mandatory because it comes with opening yourself up to a public forum even if you don't want to but still are a good sales person and are doing the right thing but want to remain anonymous.
We could never begin to find out if what people are writing is legit even if we did make it mandatory. There are days on our site that we are getting over 1000 new people coming to the site making accounts, and there is no way of finding out who they are before they post an item.
As for the scammers, its difficult for us to take someones word for it as someone may be doing the right thing and someone just has a beef against someone and wants to complain about that person for no reason.
Unfortunately there is no way for you to know what is going to happen, there are some going points in this thread as to how to protect yourself but unfortunately nothing is fool proof. A good person can turn bad at a minutes notice, and the other way around. Everyone is different and we can only try to introduce the buyer and seller together, after that our hands are tied when it comes to the transaction.