karo on nostr

DO NOT GET SCAMMED: A cautionary tale

When you buy and sell stuff using nostr and nostr-based apps, make sure you are not getting scammed. Personal experience story time below.

Sites can pick up market listing notes and show them in their website and put a "buy now" button but the payment doesn't actually go to the seller. It goes somewhere else, who knows where.

I had this happen to me. A customer messaged me and said they bought my hand knit nostr beanie hat on a site and sent me the LN invoice that they paid. It shows that the invoice is paid, but it doesn't go to my wallet. I did not get paid.

As someone who has been in the community a long time, I know that the buyer-seller relationshiop is precarious and based in trust. In the moment, I believe the buyer and give the benefit of the doubt that something is wrong with the site. I reach out to the site owner to find out what's happening because the site is absolutely unusable for me. I see my items listed on their website and have absolutely no way to removing them. I worry that someone else will come across a hat that they like and they hit buy, only to send their money to someone else.

The site owner said they will compensate me for this mishap. As a show of good faith, I shipped the hat to the customer so that he would not sour to the idea of buying on nostr. Imagine if you were this customer who paid 107k sats and ended up with no product? He would likely never buy anything from any of us again.

At the time of writing, it still hasn't been resolved between me and the site. They have not paid me like they said they would but I'm giving some grace since it is a holiday weekend.

I had to talk about it now though. It has been a cloud over me the last few days. I hope that holiday shopping on nostr will be very successful for all sellers this year so I felt responsible for putting this message out so that we can continue to build confidence is the nostr marketplace.

The moral of the story:
When you buy on nostr, make sure you are in touch with the seller and that you are paying the seller. Do your due diligence.

I would have been well within my rights to say "too bad so sad. I didn't get paid. you got scammed by that site. bye." If you were a buyer and didn't do your due diligence to check that your money is going to the right place, you may not get what you paid for and that is perfectly reasonable within the realm of commerce on nostr.

If you have read this far, please share/boost this post. I don't want any one, buyer or seller, to get scammed shopping on nostr.

#nostrmarketplace #buywithbitcoin #shopnostr

karo

1763580376

Now shipping!
Bitcoin hand knit wool hats ☃️
107k sats with free US shipping. 5% discount if you buy more than one.

If you go to my shopstr page, you can see the listings for each hat individually and get size and material info. Some are wool and some are wool with alpaca.