At Paxful, we take the safety of your crypto seriously. We take it so seriously that Chainalysis—a team of blockchain analysis experts trusted by leading banks and governments—named us one of the safest exchanges in the world.
To ensure that you continue to stay safe on our platform, we’ve put together some guidelines that can help you along your crypto journey. Keep reading to see how you can stay safe when trading crypto.
Verification Status
A quick and helpful way to easily and safely trade is to take a look at a user’s verification status. Paxful has several verification levels that our team checks with a close eye, and the more verified the user is, the more it shows that they’re honest and willing traders.
When creating an offer, you can even make it a trading prerequisite for your partner to be ID-verified or have their full name shown. If a trader’s full name is shown, always double-check that the person you’re trading with has the same ID as the one you’re sending your funds to.
Requirements before trading
On top of creating an offer that ensures your trade partner is ID verified, you can check off a few other requirements when using Trade Lite. While Trade Lite is only for traders using PayPal as their payment method, it’s still helpful to know.
Trade Lite is an automated trade flow where you don’t chat with your partner, which allows you to make a few mandatory requirements that can verify the buyer’s identity. You can ask for:
- A selfie of your partner with their ID
- A receipt, payment, or transfer confirmation
Positive feedback
It’s important that you take a look at a user’s feedback before trading with them. Users with a large amount of positive feedback are generally a pretty good sign. After all, who would say something bad about a partner who is quick and easy to trade with? If you want to take it a step further, you can check a trader’s negative feedback score and see what others have said about them.
To learn more about feedback and how to view another user’s score visit our Help Center page on Feedback and Reputation.
Trusted users
Keep in mind that positive feedback isn’t the only way to see if someone is a reliable user. Someone who is a Paxful Peer, Ambassador, or someone with a corporate account will have undergone an additional layer of security checks from Paxful. These specific users also received their status by successfully completing trades and following Paxful guidelines. Here’s what the badges look like:
These logos will appear within the user’s profile. Keep in mind that users that have the above badges will also have the Trusted icon next to their username when you view their offers in the marketplace.
Chatting etiquette
Once you start a chat with your trading partner, it’s important to stay professional and to the point. This will ensure you only discuss trading topics in the chat and it’ll help you trade with your partner more efficiently. However, if you run into any problems, we recommend that you cancel the trade and reach out to our Support Team. Be sure to let them know what happened and who your trade partner was. We’ll take it from there.
Escrow
Paxful’s escrow system is a third-party system where a seller’s BTC is placed once a trade starts. Keep in mind that Paxful doesn’t hold onto the BTC once it’s in escrow.
Think of escrow like a virtual lockbox where a trusted person puts the BTC in a secure place for both trading parties, only allowing access once the payment is received and confirmed. This is why we strongly recommend not moving off escrow.
When you move off escrow to trade on other messaging platforms, there is no guarantee that your money is safe. However, when you trade on Paxful, you can easily open a dispute if anything goes wrong. When there’s a dispute, our moderators will review the dispute and award it to the deserving party.
If you ever receive a message from someone pretending to be a moderator or a Paxful employee and they ask you to trade outside of escrow, we recommend you start a dispute right away. No moderator will ever ask you to trade outside of escrow.
Two-factor authentication (2FA)
An easy way you can protect yourself is to enable 2FA on your account—it’s the best way to verify all your logins, transactions, send-outs, and withdrawals. It’s also your first line of defense against anyone who isn’t you. You should also enable your security questions and give answers only you would know.
If you need help enabling 2FA visit our Help Center.
Receipts
While you don’t necessarily need to provide a paper receipt when selling your BTC, you do need proof of purchase. Keeping this type of “receipt” is the best way to win a dispute if you end up in one.
What makes a good receipt on Paxful? Well, it really depends on the payment method you’re using. Let’s take a gift card transaction, for example. A good and acceptable receipt could be a quality photo of the card with its code on the back of an actual receipt from where you bought the gift card. For a bank transfer transaction, it could be a deposit slip.
It’s always good to keep a proof of purchase handy to back up any false claims or misinformation.
Disputes
So, by now, you’ve probably heard a lot about disputes. The Dispute button will always be there to help you out if you run into trouble. However, knowing when to file a dispute can not only protect your money but also save you time.
To effectively trade on Paxful, it’s important to familiarize yourself with any safety information we mentioned so you know when to ask for a moderator’s help.
Your safety is our top priority
At Paxful, we put your safety at the top of our priorities. We’ll do everything in our power to create a safe trading environment for everyone. If you ever encounter any issues, you can always check the current status of our systems or even reach out to our Support Team.
By taking these tips seriously, you can keep your money and yourself safe. On top of that, these are also great trading practices that can help you become a master trader. Now, let’s get trading!
