Okay, so I've been thinking about this for a while and for the life of me can't recall what it was, or if there has been any word on this. I've been reading around the forums but haven't seen anything address this in particular about Player Missions, so please forgive me if this has been addressed already.

For simplicity sake I'll just refer to these as False Contracts instead of False/Trap Contracts/Missions, because this is the term I'm familiar with.

For those of you who are not aware of or familiar with this concept, here are the basics of a False Contract:

1: A player requests escort or delivery of some good through some air space via a contract.
2: The contractor has allies waiting in a system on the route from point A to point B.
3: The contractor's allies ambush you, kill you, salvage your stuff, and collect on any deposit or insurance required for the contract.

Now most often the allies are not officially affiliated with the contractor, to hide or cover for the contractor. The allies are usually in a different organization or something along those lines, but this is the general idea of the False Contract. I've had it said before that if you have no evidence that the contractor and the "aggressors" are affiliated officially how would you know? Most often in other similar games, False Contractors gain a reputation in a local area as being a false contractor and the community stays away from them, you can see how this would be a problem for people not in touch with the local community. Key giveaways are the route taking you through dangerous space or the contract deposit/insurance or payout being extraordinarily high for the cargo being hauled. The biggest giveaway is much harder to find, often requiring investigative research and archive mining. Finding an organized party in hostile space picking off a player isn't that rare a thing, but the evidence comes from repeat offenders. Seeing roughly the same group of players attacking people on contracts from the same person time and time again should raise a few flags.

So I am aware that there is the rating system to have contractors gain a negative reputation. There is a latent difficulty for an individual in an isolated instance to be aware if a False Contract has taken place or not, and I know the rating system may remedy this but will likely not unless additional data on failed contracts is given.

What I'd like to know is if there are any measures, planned or discussed, to be able to find out what parties were involved in causing the contract to fail. If there is a way to flag such contractors as being what they are, or any other system that could be brainstormed for this? Is this even a potential issue for Star Citizen, or would this be seen as a community driven game dynamic within the projected vision of the game?

Finally a little background for those of you who have stuck around through this messy ramble of thought and wonder where this is all coming from. We'll say that I have a "little" bit of experience in dealing with False Contractors in other games. My experience was in finding them and halting their operations by counter ambushing the contractor's allies repeatedly, forcing the False Contracts completion. This is a form a griefing, I feel there are no arguments about that. I also feel it hurts the community and new players severely [mostly new and solo players]. We could rely on players to prevent this form of griefing, and I certainly don't mind being paid to uproot these forms of contracts by communities, but I can't help but wonder if there is a better way to prevent this from being a problem in the first place.