CSI:MTGOL (Part 1 of 2)

I am playing my favorite MMO game when my email client, Thunderbird, dinged.  Upon reading the header, the message is coming into one of my bot’s email accounts.

I just traded with your bot and never received the cards.  Can you send me the cards or refund my credits?

Curious, I moved my character to a safe place and investigated further.  The trade was for four (4) cards, costing .84 tickets.  My spider sense has not tingled yet.  I look up the card in question and it doesn’t look like something many players would want, much less more than four (4) copies.

I decided to trust this individual and went into the Library dashboard and refunded his credits.  I then sent an email to the customer informing him his credits were refunded.  I then resumed playing my MMO.

About ten (10) minutes later, Thunderbird dinged again.  This time it was from my aggregate bot account where all trades are filtered to and it showed that this customer again traded with the bot and the same four (4) cards were traded.  Since I did not hear back from this person, I am safely assuming that there has been no further problems, all costing me a little bit of MMO playing time.

So, how do I know the customer was not trying to rip me off?  ML Bot has a lot of little-known debug tools to verify if a trade really happened, despite things like the connection down, or Mtgo giving a false message, or the crash of the laptop hosting the bot.  How can a transaction be completed and cards not be transferred?  I’ll answer those questions next time.