Credit scoring and fraud detection/prevention are big problems in games and virtual economies in general. Keep me posted about your progress (DM @fsimoneschi).

This is very true. Currently the best communities can really do is name and shame. Obviously this means there will always be a larger percentage of scammers here than normal. The other big issue with the community driven method is that people can't really take their lumps with a temp ban. Make one bad decision and it will haunt you

As people spend more and more time inside virtual worlds the natural progression is for people to trade in-game items for cash. If someone could make rent just playing WoW and selling items, there in-game time would skyrocket! Unfortunately game companies are pretty against this with the only real exception being Valve.

The biggest argument against cash trading is that it ruins the markets for 'normal' players who don't want to grind gold. Markets in general are hard but throwing in the requirement that they also have to be fun makes the challenge extremely difficult. Competing against bots just ruins the market aspect of the game for most players.

I'm not sure what the solution is but I think a core issue is that most companies don't think of structuring the game around the economy and item entropy. This leads to weird inefficiencies and massive inflation when players and bots alike start grinding gold heavily. The only game that really comes close to fixing this issue is EVE Online. Their market is fairly well built and expensive items can disappear in an instant making runaway inflation not as much of an issue (though still very present).

It's an annoying problem from the traders prospective because fraud runs rampant and there isn't a ton we can do. Sites like mine help raise the bar required to scam large amounts of money but without the game companies support it will always be an ongoing battle.

This kind of app can be super useful to do background check in other situations (startups, so called head hunters).