How to open a dispute on a deal that has gone wrong, what happens once you do, and how the message thread and evidence work.
If something has gone wrong with a deal you have paid for or sold, you can open a dispute against it.
Either side can open one — buyer or seller. A dispute puts you and the other party in a private thread that Silky Road can see, and freezes the deal so it cannot quietly complete while the case is open.
A dispute is about a transaction
This is the most important thing to get right. A dispute attaches to one specific transaction — not to a listing, and not to a person.
That means:
- If a deal completed and went wrong, a dispute is the right tool.
- If you want to complain about a listing or a member where no deal took place, a dispute is the wrong tool — use reporting instead. See Reporting a message or user.
An offer that was never paid for is not a transaction, so it will not appear in the list of deals you can dispute.
How to open one
- Go to disputes in your dashboard.
- Pick which deal you are disputing from the list of your transactions. Each shows the listing title, the price, its status and whether you were the buyer or the seller.
- Provide:
- a subject (required)
- a description (required)
- a type — what kind of problem it is
- Optionally attach evidence.
Everything that identifies the case — which transaction, which listing, who the parties are, and the disputed amount — is taken from the transaction itself. The disputed amount is the deal's final price and cannot be changed to a different figure.
- The dispute is created with the status open.
- The deal freezes so it cannot be auto-completed or released while the case runs.
- The other party is notified, and Silky Road's team is alerted.
Note that you are not notified of your own actions, so you will not get a message about the dispute you just opened.
Talking to the other party
Every dispute has its own message thread, separate from ordinary chat. The buyer, the seller and Silky Road can all read and post in it. This is where you explain what happened and respond to the other side.
A few things worth knowing:
- Message text is required — you cannot send attachments alone.
- Blocking does not apply here. If you have blocked the other party, they can still take part in a dispute you share. That is deliberate, so a case can actually be heard.
- Silky Road staff may add internal notes that you do not see, and no notification is sent for those. If it looks like nobody has responded, work may still be happening.
- A suspended account cannot post in a dispute, even one it is a party to. If that applies to you, contact support rather than leaving it — you should not be unable to respond to a case against you.
Adding evidence
You can upload files as proof — screenshots, records, documents.
- Evidence is stored privately. It is never a public link, and it is opened through a temporary link that expires after five minutes. If a link stops working, open it again from the dispute for a fresh one.
- The file's actual contents are checked, not its name. Renaming a file will not get it accepted — re-export it in a standard format instead.
- Both sides see each other's evidence. Assume the person you are in dispute with will read everything you upload, and do not upload anything you would not want them to see.
- There is no way to remove evidence once uploaded. Contact support if something was uploaded in error.
Uploading a file as evidence is not the same as attaching one to a message — evidence goes through the private storage route described above.
You get both an in-app notification and an email when the dispute is opened against you, when the other party sends a message, when the status changes, and when it is resolved.
Two caveats worth setting expectations on:
- You are not notified about your own messages, so silence does not mean the other party did not receive yours.
- A dispute can occasionally move status without a notification, so it is worth checking your disputes list rather than relying entirely on alerts.
Timing
There is no deadline for opening a dispute, and there is no published timeframe for resolution. Cases are reviewed by a person. If your dispute has been open a long time with no movement, contact support rather than assuming it has been forgotten.
For what happens to the money itself, see What happens to your funds while a dispute is open.
