Payment-block risk self-check

This does not compute a probability and it does not give you a score. It is a list that makes you stop for ten seconds before opening an order. Each line is a protection you can actually control, and the ones you cannot tick are your exposure on this trade.

There is no score here, and there should not be We removed the percentage this tool used to output. The reason: producing a meaningful risk number would require knowing how much each protection reduces the probability, and we do not have that data — nor can anyone else running a site like this obtain it. Assembling a set of weights and multiplying them out looks rigorous and is really an editorial ranking wearing the costume of a measurement. The underlying trigger is whether the counterparty's funds have a clean upstream, and that is not observable by you. A fully ticked list does not mean safe; it means you have done what was available to you. Nothing reduces P2P cash-out risk to zero.

Why each item is here, and why there is no score (expand)

What it is for

The characteristic feature of this problem is that every step looks completely normal beforehand, and only afterwards do you discover you skipped three or four layers of protection. This lists those layers explicitly, so there is a pause before you press release.

Why selling is riskier than buying

When you buy, the money going out is yours — your salary, your savings — and you are the origin of that chain. When you sell, the money comes from someone else and you have no visibility into where it was before. If it came from fraud, gambling or laundering, investigators follow it forward and your account is on the list. The overwhelming majority of blocked accounts happen on the selling side, which is why choosing "selling" causes the receiving-side items to be called out separately.

Why we removed the score

An earlier version assigned each item a weight from 2 to 4, summed them, produced a percentage, and banded the result. We even explained at the time that the weights were ordered by how hard each failure is to recover from, rather than picked arbitrarily.

That explanation does not hold up. "The ordering has a rationale" and "the numbers have a basis" are different claims. For the difference between 65% and 78% to mean anything, you would need to know how many percentage points each protection removes — which requires case data that has no public source and that we cannot obtain. Without it, the weights are just tidy-looking numbers, and the percentage they produce reads as a measurement while actually being an editorial opinion.

Worse, it distorted judgement in the wrong direction: someone seeing 82% relaxes, even when the item they skipped was the name check. So this now does exactly one thing: it puts every unticked item back in front of you, all of them, unweighted, unscaled, with no verdict attached. That makes the tool less satisfying to use. We think the trade is worth it.

Then why are the first four separated out?

Because their failure mode is a different kind from the rest. A name that does not match, an account that is not yours, releasing without confirming, mixing with everyday banking — each of those either causes an immediate loss or leaves you unable to account for yourself afterwards. That is an editorial judgement, not a measurement, which is why it appears as an ordering and a label rather than a number.

The remaining items have no internal ranking. We tried to produce one and found that every ordering could be overturned by a plausible real scenario, so we stopped.

One thing that is not on the list

If you are actually blocked, the order of your first day's actions matters more than the actions themselves: establish who imposed it (investigative hold, bank risk control, or platform restriction — three completely different roads), gather your records, and engage with whoever is actually asking. Do not pay an unfreezing intermediary, do not try to move the remaining funds, do not delete records. The full sequence is in cash in and cash out.

Where the data comes from

This page connects to nothing, queries no external data, and does not record what you tick. It performs no calculation — the only thing that happens in your browser is that unticked items get listed again. Refreshing clears it. The items come from the preventive measures set out in this site's articles and from publicly discussed practice; they are not any institution's official standard and have not been empirically validated.