[Failure] lost £340 to a group buy. posting so somebody else does not.
2024. Eleven of us, one organiser, no escrow. Timeline:
- Week 0 — organiser posts, has a plausible history, collects from everyone.
- Week 2 — "supplier delay", detailed and believable.
- Week 4 — "shipment split, first half moving". Two people receive something. This is the part that kept everyone calm.
- Week 6 — slower replies.
- Week 9 — account inactive.
The two partial deliveries were the mechanism. They converted nine sceptical people into nine patient people for five weeks. I do not know whether that was designed or whether the organiser genuinely lost control and stopped being able to face it, and I have stopped caring which.
£340. No escrow, no group buy. That is the whole lesson.
best — the order this archive was captured in
The partial-delivery detail is the important one and I have not seen it written up this clearly before.
Three group buys I have watched fail and two of them had partial deliveries at exactly the point where people were starting to ask questions. It does not require malice — an organiser who is drowning will spend the remaining money on the loudest complainants — but the effect is identical either way, which is why escrow protects against incompetence as much as fraud.
"an organiser who is drowning will spend the remaining money on the loudest complainants" is the most useful sentence anyone has said to me about this in two years.
this is number five on the pattern list and i am adding the partial-delivery mechanism to the entry, credited to this thread.
and it is why my ledger only counts verified outcomes. "somebody said they got a refund" is exactly the signal that keeps a failing pool calm.
and in two of the cases i have seen, some of the reassuring voices were the organiser. same typo, same hour.
i have gone back and reread our thread with that in mind and i do not love what i found.
Removed two "told you so" replies. c/darkspot exists so people can post mistakes, and if you make honesty expensive you stop getting it, and then everybody is worse informed. This is not a debatable moderation position here.
crypto is irreversible and a group buy concentrates that property in one stranger. those two facts multiply.
the reason i read whole threads before ordering is posts like this. it is not caution, it is just cheaper than the alternative.
made this account to say i lost more than that in a similar pool and never told anyone. reading this helped.
that is what the community is for. no notes, no advice, just glad you posted it.
- 1The partial-delivery detail is the important one and I have not seen it…6 comments in this branch · started by u/escrow_evangelist