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I traded with him directly through his website Lestrades for LEST (the sites currency / IOU token (the latter as the site calls it itself)). Following a dispute, he banned my account and confiscated my remaining balance of $0.67 USD in LEST, redistributing it to a random user instead of letting me trade or withdraw it:

Ban notice: https://lestrades.com/official/935/banned-user-list/msg38024/#msg38024
Imgur backup: https://imgur.com/a/IWyjG33

Since part of my LEST balance was obtained through direct trades with him, seizing my remaining balance without compensation resulted in a loss of funds from our trades. Because of the ban, I no longer have access to my on-site trade history, but I can provide private chat logs to ST mods upon request (logs contain personal info, so I prefer not to share them publicly).

I am leaving this review so other traders are aware that site balances can be seized without compensation.

Side note: The public ban reason contains severe misconstructions and untrue statements. In private chats, he admitted to simply losing patience and to not even having read the full chat log himself, primarily getting his POV on the situation through a council member, that had a severely biased opinion of me, probably because of moderator burnout.

EDIT: Since Nao removed his response to my negative review and the later edits and replaced it with another version entirely, here is the old conversation / Edits we had back and forth. Some of it is rather enlightening: https://imgur.com/a/bOtRHIm

Additionally: For me, its rather telling that he used his authority over his userbase on his Discord server and asked his users to vote for him and then apparently people started using their "army" to vote for him. A disgrace: https://imgur.com/a/0yELVEh

Ín response to his new version of his response:

I shouldn't be getting these negative reviews just for the sake of owning and maintaining a trading website.

That is not the reason for the negative review. He confiscated LEST balance, which is an IOU token / money he himself mints every month and gives to himself and then trade away for games. A lot of my LEST balance was obtained through trading with him. Since he did not give me adequate time to trade away the balance and just banned me out of him throwing a tantrum, even if he didnt do it for monetary gain himself, I was scammed out of my balance by his actions.

SteamTrades ratings are for scammers, not as retaliation/bullying against service providers after a ban for not complying to terms of service.

Well, to me, taking away someones money without compensation after giving him said money in a trade in exchange for game keys is exactly that: Scamming.

His site as far as I can tell does not have a Terms of Service. There are guidelines though. The only time I technicality didnt obey the guidelines of your site was a minute thing that I tried to contest, but he demolished the eventually healthy conversation about it in the probation thread.

The ban was due to him personally being frustrated of me stopping to give him respect after repeated abusive behavior from him and some of his council members. I treated him personally with respect for weeks, through multiple instances where he shouldve lost that privilege by abusing me again and again. I can provide evidence for that, he can let me know with an edit if he want the logs to be public or not.

Id love to share them, but I dont feel like it has a lot to do with the nature of the review: Him confiscating my money / IOU token on his website and not giving me the option of trading it for something, after he himself gave me said IOU token in exchange for game keys.

My experience trading with Nao, the admin of lestrades.com, ended with me buying replacement keys after repeated failed attempts to complete a trade, followed by probation and then a ban.

I had already redeemed the keys he sent, so I made roughly 10 attempts over more than two weeks to deliver my games. Several times, he contacted me, I responded shortly afterward, and he was already unavailable again. He also kept extending the trade beyond his site’s normal time limit. I had told him I had very little time to trade, and I couldn’t keep waiting indefinitely.

To resolve it, I went out of my way to buy replacement keys and cancelled the trade. He wanted the original games, which nobody else on his site was offering, and put me on probation. When I objected, the situation escalated to a ban. Being the admin shouldn’t mean he can keep extending a trade and expect the other person to remain available until it suits him.

This also wasn’t my first uncomfortable interaction with him. In our conversations, I’ve repeatedly encountered accusations and dismissive comments. At our first interaction, he called me a scammer and suggested I should give him my keys for free because I hadn’t earned them. That dismisses the time I spend working with developers and following through on review copies.

I also have concerns about his Lest currency. He told me he gives himself a few hundred dollars’ worth each month, and I have screenshots of that conversation. The total I saw was $3,850 in generated Lest. My concern is that he can create currency to acquire users’ games, while those users depend on the site and its available inventory to get value back. When I was banned, I also lost access to the remaining $0.44 in my account.

My negative review is based on how he handled this trade and treated me throughout it. Maintaining a website doesn’t put someone above criticism for their own conduct.

UPDATE — response to his reply:
His claim that I was warned to spend my Lest before being banned is false. He initially put me on probation. I misunderstood that as a ban and complained that I had lost my balance. He then replied that I hadn’t been banned, but now I was, and banned me without giving me an opportunity to respond or spend it. Raising the balance issue came before the ban; there was no advance warning to use it. The amount was only $0.44, but the issue is his inaccurate account of what happened.

His reply also acknowledges that I redeemed his keys while leaving out that I bought replacement keys for him after repeatedly trying to complete the original exchange. I didn’t simply take his games and refuse to provide anything back.

This wasn’t a matter of expecting him to be available at whatever time I wanted. On three occasions, I responded within 15 minutes of him messaging me, granted the access needed to redeem the games, and waited another 5–10 minutes before revoking access when he didn’t respond. Across the whole trade, I made roughly 10 attempts over more than two weeks. During that period, he found time to send lengthy criticisms and accusations, but we still couldn’t finish the exchange.

He also kept extending the offer past the point when it would normally have closed under his own site’s rules. After those repeated attempts and buying replacement keys, I don’t think I was obligated to keep waiting for his convenience just because he could extend the trade as admin.

At the start of this trade, he also suggested that his status as admin should be enough for me to trust him with access to all my pages. I should be able to set limits on access to my own pages without being criticized for it. Running a trading website doesn’t automatically entitle someone to that trust.

I was upset, and my original wording reflected that. But calling this review “bullying” doesn’t address the repeated delays, the replacement keys, or the actual sequence of the probation and ban. Those are the reasons for my negative review, and his reply leaves out the details needed to understand them.