Be careful with bad actors during P2P transactions
People use multiple options to buy and sell crypto. After the recent regulations from the government, there are several means by which people can do crypto transactions and people also consider it very safe. But today there was a message getting popular on Twitter that showed the risk while doing P2P transactions on Binance.
https://twitter.com/sonali_rawat12/status/1651591907162869760
Binance is one of the best exchanges that facilitate P2P crypto transactions. The facility is in such a way that people look for options to buy or sell crypto. Based on the offers listed there, people choose and do the trade. Binance acts as the intermediate in this and the transaction happens between the buyer and the seller without any middleman fee. Technically Binance can charge a middleman fee for this but they are not having any charges for the P2P transaction.
Everyone considered that to be one of the safest options because all the users who can do this is a KYC users and verified users and the possibility for bad transactions is very minimal. I agree that we cannot fully say for sure that all the transactions we do there would be safe because there are bad actors everywhere. @mango-juice shared a link on our discord today where someone had a bad experience while doing a P2P transaction on Binance.
I was going through the conversation and there was the explanation given by others on why this can happen but in spite of all that, it rings a bell that we have to be very careful when dealing with people whom we do not know. Maybe it is safe to do transactions with people who we know very well. It is important to check if the user is a verified user or not and we should also be checking the number of transactions the user has done in the past. Having a good rating gives us confidence that we are not dealing with someone who is a bad actor.
People use Binance and other mediums to do bad activities to convert their money to crypto that they earned through the wrong means. Imagine someone doing a bank hack and using Binance to convert that money to crypto. When the money enters the crypto world, it is hard to trace where it goes. But until then there is some control available where people can verify their identity with KYC details and authorize bank accounts. Binance has explained that they are taking a lot of steps to avoid such things but in spite of all the steps they take, there are bad actors.
I think the easy solution would be to avoid anonymous P2P transactions and even if we do it, we have to be sure about whom we are dealing with. We might end up locking our bank account with lots of funds in that. Some people have mentioned that they have had instances where several lacks were locked by the banks and they had to travel long distances to submit documents and prove things. It is better to avoid such things if we try and verify our buyer or seller. Mostly this challenge happens only when we receive a credit to our account. The reason is because the Cyber Crime department would ask us for the source of that money and if the source is from a bad guy then we would be having problems.
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