How to check if a seller is real before you send anything
Most "verification" advice checks things that are trivial to fake. Here's what separates a real seller from a convincing one, roughly in order of how much it's worth.
Signals that are worth something
Reviews tied to completed orders. This is the strongest one available. If a review can only exist because a transaction actually completed on the platform, then buying fake reviews requires buying fake transactions, which costs real money and leaves a trail. If reviews are free-text posts anyone can submit, they're marketing copy. Most sites don't tell you which kind theirs are — that's usually informative in itself.
A record that's boring. Twenty ordinary orders over three months, a couple of them mediocre, is a far better signal than forty perfect five-star reviews in one week. Real sellers have bad days. A record with no texture is a record that was constructed.
Specificity about delivery. A seller who tells you exactly how the handover works — which league, in-game trade or drop, roughly how long, what they need from you — has done it before. Vagueness is not always dishonesty, but it's always inexperience, and inexperience is its own risk.
Willingness to go slowly. A real seller with stock is fine with you buying a small amount first. Someone who resists a small test order is telling you something.
Signals worth close to nothing
Account age and follower counts. Bought and traded routinely.
Screenshots of stock or of past trades. Trivially borrowed from someone else. A screenshot proves someone somewhere had something once.
"Vouches" in a chat channel. In an unmoderated channel these cost nothing to manufacture and are frequently traded between accounts.
Being confidently reassuring. The convincing ones are convincing. That's what makes them a problem. Reassurance is the cheapest thing a scammer produces.
The pressure test
Nearly every loss in this hobby has the same shape somewhere in it: the buyer was moved out of the protected path.
Watch for:
- "Pay me directly, I'll knock 10% off." The discount is real; what you're giving up is worth more.
- "Let's finish this on Discord/Telegram, it's faster."
- "My marketplace account is having issues, use this wallet address."
- Any urgency that isn't a real timer on a real order — a price that expires in ten minutes, stock that's about to run out, a deal that's only good right now.
A seller who wants to leave the platform wants to leave the part of the platform that protects you. There is no version of that request which is in your interest.
The thing that makes most of this unnecessary
All of the above is about predicting whether someone will behave well, because in an unprotected trade their behaviour is the only thing between you and losing the money.
Change the structure and the prediction stops carrying so much weight. If the platform holds your payment until you confirm delivery, a seller who doesn't deliver doesn't get paid — so the worst case stops being "you lose the money" and becomes "you wasted an afternoon and got refunded."
That doesn't make seller quality irrelevant. You still want someone fast, accurate and responsive, and the checklist above is how you find them. It means getting it wrong costs you time instead of money.
On Stashhaven, reviews exist only where an order completed, payment is held until the buyer confirms, and buyers pay no fee. If a seller asks you to settle up somewhere else, that's the moment to stop.
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