Safe Trading

[McMacCheese]

Hey guys, do you know of any way to make trading safe?

I see a fair bit of scamming, very blatant at that so its obvious scammers are profiting. In fact, I see many running the same scheme for significant amounts of time. To be honest, if I knew I'd permanently lose what I was trading, despite video evidence I'd never have used /trade to begin with.

I'm leery of CoD mail, considering a troll could keep me parted from my items for up to a month. But, so far its my preferred way to evade that AH tax.

What do you do to stay safe and prosperous in these trying times?

[OhieMitzen]

What do you do to stay safe and prosperous in these trying times?

Max out professions* myself what comes to crafting expensive items. What I can't craft, I ask guildies and/or friends if they can do it for me. Actual friends, not some randoms you spent 5 minutes questing with in Borean Tundra.
* When you play here long enough, you'll eventually have all professions maxed anyway
Big money trades (buying/selling primos) I prefer to do with C.O.D. or trade small amounts 1st, before trading full stack(s).

I just AH (sell) items if I'm not in big of a rush, and adjust price a bit higher to circumvent around the tax. E.g. primo price when trading is 500, put it in AH for 525g, the tax cuts it to just below 500 (not gonna cry after few golds at this point). If I had put the primos to sell for 500g each on AH, the tax cuts it to 475g.

[angrylol]

AH is the best way in terms of reach, scale and time spent.
C.O.D is great, tough it's max amount is 10'000 gold. Also C.O.D mail will be returned to you in 3 days if not accepted. Major downside is that people don't understand how it works and sending multiple items they think they have to pay your total sum for each item instead of whole mail.

Trade is NOT SAFE, even if you are most careful person in the world. There are things that can change items/gold AFTER both sides press Accept. Tough it hasn't happened lately, but at one point in the past it was like a plague. Overall you will lose to scammers way more than AH 5% tax and deposits.

[Kovachut]

In the past a dude offered a solution for trade scamming in the form of an addon. You can learn more about it in this thread:

http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=342730

P.S.: I don't know why the guy was banned. Recently there was a user, who shared a DBM addon for Frostmourne, that contained a malicious code. It could be the case, that both accounts belong to the same person. So, if you decide to download SafeTrade, make sure you check whether people have some complaints. Here's the page to the addon I was referring to:

http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=422169

And a quote from the game developer:

I hope this is a reminder to everyone to not just install anything you find on the internet onto your computer. Even if its just something seemingly harmless like an add-on for a game.