How to spot a scam?

[toxicm0th]

Hello!

I've recently seen people talking about having to 'deal with scammers' and I'm curious what a scam on chicken smoothie might look like so I can avoid falling for it.

I assume it is generally just sending unfair trades assuming the person doesn't understand the value of their pet, but I'm just curious if there are other red flags to be aware of?

Thanks friends!

[Celozon]

What is considered 'scamming' is going to be very subjective from person to person. I think your are correct in what people mean when they say it ('sending a purposefully unfair trade'), but personally I do think people tend to over-use it and end up calling essentially any unfair trade a scam. Just be aware when you see people calling something a scam that they may just mean its unfair, I've seen plenty of trades sent from someone who just didn't know pet values get called a scam cause it was unfair. The official site stance is that a trade is only considered a scam if the other user is lying to you about a pet's value or otherwise provably misleading you. Those sorts of trades are reportable.

As for avoiding them, I would suggest utilizing the resources over on the Trading Guide board, there are threads with lists of values for high value pets, threads for asking other people's opinions on trades you received, asking about pet values, etc. If you get a trade that seems suspiciously 'too good to be true', such as someone offering you a bunch of pets for a single one of yours, just double-check over on those threads that your pet doesn't have any special/high value that you might not be aware of.

[Rabid_Jaguar]

You'll want to be especially careful about 'scams' when trading any pets from the December 18th advent event. Each year on December 18th, old rare & up pets are 'rereleased' and have the chance to be adopted on that day. Since the pets may be still growing and have no rarity value assigned to them, or since they may have additional demand value not represented by their rarity bar, some users may try to trade for these pets in the hopes that their original owners don't understand the value of these pets.