The role I am referring to is rather loosely that of a Fence Heres a definition http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fence Often in ABing I get into possession of something quite valuable and difficult to get rid of, I'm not specifically speaking of HTS though they can be. For example let me take a r99 stamp like a scuzzy stamp. Hypothetically I snag one on an autobuying account, now I am not so worried about being frozen cause I bought it because I manage my setting and buy times in my Aber's carefully and am aware of the risks in autobuying. What I am worried about is getting rid of the bloody thing. The way I see it I'm faced with a couple choices. 1) Stick it in the SDB and sell later, My personal opinion is that this doesn't help the situation much it will still be a somewhat dodgy item from a young-ish account. I could put onto my main to sell but I personally hate risking my main with something so small like a bit of NP, all it takes is for some sharp eyed bitter restocker to be thinking "I'm an elite super restocker in stamp hence any valuable stamp I or my friends did not restock must be ABed" and report you, this is particularly valid if your selling from a 3-4 monther or otherwise young account. 2) Just keep in SDB till it retires or becomes avvie item or something This is what I currently do, the logic being that once an item is widely traded its visibility decreases and you can be more sure on price as well. This is why if I get a high end MP or ZDAP or something I don't care about how I trade it cause its a low visibility transaction despite its high value, people sell those things all the time and unless your really really young (eg. one monther) no-one will care making your transaction low risk. However, this takes pretty much forever and is undesirable. 3) Just try sell it on a young account for cheap on the TP/ auction maybe ask for a price check/advertise on boards/mail people who lack it in their gallery Probably the worst choice possible, people get really suspicious and your visibility is really high, high freeze chance imo 4) Try bid on other valuable items that are less visible Slightly better than choice 3 but can often be problematic as some people may be paranoid particularly if the deal is very good for them. Also can be time consuming as this becomes essentially a barter type situation which is far more difficult than a neopoints to items transaction. What I am suggesting is that we need a group of people that can operate as fences for our goods. I am aware that this function can to some degree be fulfilled by the blackmarket but it's not often exercised and I think maybe formalizing an expression for it and how a transaction of this nature would work would provide more depth to illegit dealings. Basically what we need is a group of illegit people who are also resellers. Resellers are a legitimate 'type' of person in the trading post forums that deal with lots of different items and off loads and on loads items all the time. If we have a person who is accustomed to all the account switching and ip switching associated with illegit dealings and the reselling process then we could have those people deal with our stuff, with a suitable mark up obviously to reflect their risk. Note I am only suggesting the fence deal with ABed items not actually stolen/cracked stuff. What I envision the 'professional' fence doing is being an active reseller that manages multiple different items with which they resell. Sellers approach them with the valuable item in question and the fence gives them a quote, if satisfactory they do a quick TP trade and the seller gets some cheap stock to deal with and no one is really surprised when a reseller is selling some strange very rare item (ie. they are low visibility). Obviously there is that danger of the ABer getting their account frozen and affecting the Fence, however, this is where the experience of the fence kicks in. They know how to deal with the risks and will be able to minimize any potential loss by only keeping a small amount of their assets vulnerable to freezing. Basically, I'd be interested in dealing with some respected and experienced neofriends users who specialize in dealing with my valuable ABed items that for one reason or another are high visibility. They give me a quote of around 50% of the items value and we both go away happy, obviously with no obligation on the sellers part to sell. In other words I would be able to pass on my risk to someone who is specifically skilled in this department to deal with the risk. Any thoughts on the viability of said idea? There will obviously be problems related to this but conceptually this could be the germ of an idea for a formalized 'job' in the black market. If anyone has a better way they deal with 'high visibility' items please post as well.
That sounds like a good idea in theory... I'm sure there will be some problems encountered along the way however. Personally, I'd rather be the reseller in the situation. 50% of the value, to resell an item. Sounds fair and in my experience not really that hard. And less risk than being the person who AB's... One Problem I see is if you keep selling restocked items to another person at 50%, Im sure TNT will get suspicious at some point. Might get the alarm bells ringing. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this topic.. I'd like to see how it works.
Ok so to sum up everything you posted in one sentence it would be. You are looking for resellers to buy your abed items at 50% of cost and resell for their own profit. Right? If that's the case I'm sure there are people on here who currently do that or are on the lookout for something like this because I used to do the same thing a couple years back on here(I was the aber though). It's pretty good business depending on what kind of items you are trying to get rid of and especially if you don't mind losing out on a bit of profit. I'd suggest just going on the black market in the item section whenever you have I'd say around 5-10 major items you're trying to get rid of, Post that you're looking for a reseller to buy them at 50% value (I'd suggest you know the current market price of your item it really speeds up the process and you know you're not getting cheated) and just go from there choosing who you'd want to sell to. The only problem I see is that allot of legit resellers already buy things at 50-65% of actual cost on neopets so might might have to be willing to go a little lower depending on the item.
well the percentages are obviously something that you can decide for yourself, I would not go anywhere lower than 50% on the types of items that I'm thinking of. I'm not talking about HTS cause some of the stuff you might pick up with 'high visibility' might not be hts's so 50% is a generally decent base. The reason I did this post is to see if I can flush out buyers instead of sellers, i mean sure it could work with the sellers saving till they had 5-10 major items but obviously they wouldn't want to post exactly what those items were and alot of unnecessary PMing and stuff needs to take place. Hence it would be simpler if there was some way to set it up so there are a couple people with threads advertising themselves as good/reputable 'resellers', maybe even some way that reputed 'resellers' could get a tag by their username like with the trader awards. The resellers could maybe set out what items they like to deal with, and a general idea of how they decide on prices (eg. lowest on TP minus 500k for 5mill + items)
Ahh ok now I see. As far as the percentages go I was just generalizing because allot of the time when people post things to sell here they are hts or mts. I can see where you're going with this and it is a very good idea that usually gets tossed around and some people take to while others don't. Only reason why I say post in the BM is to actually get some resellers thinking about the idea.
Long post is long for a reason, I guess I wasn't clear. The only items that need to be fenced are high visibility items (ie. people would notice/pay attention to), draik/krawk mp's are commonly traded as hell, no-one gives a crap when they are traded so they can be sold at close to full price no problems. There is also the added issue of pricing an item that is has high visibility, jellyneo can be unreliable tp might not even have one so dealing with a pre-approved illegit reseller could be perfect, cause you definitely don't want to be doing a price check on neo. As long as I can be sure the illegit reseller won't completely rip me off I'd be pretty happy