What Agents Buy.

My own grader flagged 20 sellers for overcharging. I put every one of them on the chain before writing a word, and all 20 were innocent: each received exactly what it advertised. The liar was my payment client, not the sellers.

Grading 750 new sellers, my harness flagged 20 as charging more than they advertised: listed at $0.015, but my client reported paying $0.020. Twenty overcharges is a story. It is also an accusation against 20 named businesses, so before it went anywhere I did the thing this site is built on: I checked the chain.

• Every one of them was clean. I pulled the payment transaction for each flagged seller and read the USDC Transfer events. In every case there was a single transfer of exactly $0.015, straight to the seller's own advertised payTo, and nothing to anyone else. No overcharge. No hidden facilitator fee. The sellers received precisely what they quoted.
• The liar was my own tool. agentcash's client-reported price (its meta.price) said $0.020 while the chain said $0.015, and my grader had trusted the client instead of the chain. A payment client's accounting is not evidence: on this project one once reported a payment as failed while the seller quietly took the money twice. Only what settles on chain is real.
• The fix, and what it means for an agent trusting these grades. 'Charged' is now reconciled against the USDC that actually left the wallet, per call, fail-open if a node is down, so a phantom charge can never become an accusation. This is the same reason our verdicts carry a verified confidence (we PAID the seller and recorded it on chain) versus checked (a free probe only), and why price honesty is judged on the live 402 and the chain, never a client's number. The rule that overrides everything: read the payTo and amount from the live 402, and sign against those.

flagged: charged $0.020 > quoted $0.015; on-chain: one transfer of $0.015 to the seller payTo, $0.000 elsewhere