I've been running into a lot of people trying to rip me off lately. Today I have decided that I will no longer make ANY trades. But how do we protect ourselves and our ratings from ignorant buyers? The most recent, I traded a battery for some xmod parts. PARTS. Well, two days after he received the parts, he wants his battery back. He says the car won't work. He admitted to cobbling it together, tried running without an antenna, then tried using a foot of solder for his antenna and complains that the servo is glitching!!! He then asks what around the house he can use as an antenna, and asks if a paper clip will work. Obviously this guy is not working on this thing properly. And who knows what else he has done to it. I mean, if these are the things he admits to, what is he keeping secret. So, I KNOW the electronics worked when I sent it. And they don't now. So either I take the hit on my ratings which are now perfect, or I pay to send his battery back to him, and he sends me parts that he destroyed.
How do we protect ourselves from situations like this?

this one gets better. Now he's telling me that he did away with the aaa battery holders and soldered directly do the circuit board, and hooked up one of his RC batteries to it to test it.

I'm building up a large collection of emails from this guy. Now the latest is, "maybe the batteries I tried werent any good" so he's admitting that maybe his batteries werent good so he rewired the whole thing?? and it started out this morning as "the electronics don't work at all", and then later "when I first put it together, the servo was glitching and it didn't have much power" so now he says he's going to rewire it again, try new batteries, then if it doesn't work , he wants me to take it back. Can you believe some people

this gets better and better. the guy just admitted to me that he started a new profile because of bad ratings that he had in the last one.
if its so easy to start over clean like that... how do we know? should we just pick a certain number, and if the person is below that number... don't sell to them?

I am sorry you are having a problem with another RCU member.

Please remember this is a Support forum, not a place to post ratings or complaints. As such, the posts you have made since your original in this thread have been removed.

There is NO way to protect yourself when doing trades unless you meet the person face to face and have time to carefully examine the items they bring to you. In every other situation, you are going by your gut instinct based on the other persons ratings and how you feel about them through your conversations through email and possibly by phone. As there are no services, that I am aware of, which offer escrow or guarantees on trades, you are on your own in hopes the other person delivers as they promise.