It will be brilliant you trade with people who have positive reputation and offers the payment system that has some level of security. Buy following this methods your p2p transactions are secure.
Even with positive feedback you should still be on guard, because a scammer who's serious about scamming can easily engage in legit trades so that they can build their reputation afterwards they'll start their scammy activities. So an account having positive feedback does not mean that the account is safe to trade with carelessly.
I do not put feedback into consideration whenever I am about to do a p2p trade. Do not be surprised that the one you think got good feedback would be the one to play smart on you.
Most of them usually start off well and then go astray at some point in their life.
Because most of the merchants I have seen misbehaving usually have +90% successful trades and tonnes of positive feedbacks and the only negative you get to see on their pages are either complaining of slow transactions speed or slow release of coin nothing is ever said about the way they do their business.
Exactly. The whole issue starts changing when there are complaints of slow transactions or slow to receive payment. So one idea or method I have recently resorted to is checking their rating (most especially) and also checking their payment time, i.e specific time in which the merchant has agreed to complete every transaction. My reason for this is because when a merchant who uses a very long period of payment time(like an hour) to get into a trade with you, the chances that you will have trouble with that transaction is very likely, because getting stuck with a transaction without quick means of resolving it due to time factor is crazy.
And besides that, there are others that might want to fabricate a "confirmation of payment" receipt, which is sometimes possible when the transaction duration is lengthy. Aside the safety part of it, it also helps us to make quick transactions, because I have sometime waited for my p2p order to cancel when I realized that the buyer was offline, but his status showed online, and it was at about 1AM. I just had to wait patiently for the order to cancel after 1hr, which is a crazy and risk thing to do.