Please excuse me if this has been suggested in this thread already (I don't know that I've read every post), or if this exists somewhere here and I'm simply overlooking it.
I think there would be a lot of value, expecially in the absence of the BOI, to have a stickied thread/post with a list of the most common sorts of scams -- not names of people, but a list and description of techniques. There are a number of common ones that experienced buyers are familiar with, but new buyers apparently are not.
The big ones are:
Scammers replying to phone numbers/email addresses left on public posts by potential buyers, with a fraudulent claim to be the seller;
Scammers insisting on payment without buyer protection (there are a handful of good, respected sellers out there who only accept non-protected funds, and I have purchased from them, but it takes a bit of sleuthing to be a buyer in such a situation; explaining when it is safe to deal with such a seller might be valuable to novice buyers);
There are some tips that could be offered for new sellers, too, such as the red flag of a mismatch between the name on the Fauna account and the name on the PayPal account. There are a couple of...uh...people here who are operating under multiple aliases, and I'd like to see them...uh...thwarted. For a start.
And then there is the classic, tried and true, "please respond with the final asking price" cashier's check scam.
I guess a person could just start such a thread here somewhere appropriate, but I'd be afraid that in fine-tuning it, too much good info would become too hard to find in scores of pages of posts. Is there a mod who could/would be willing to condense a thread of suggestions from posters to that thread, and put them all in an easy-to-navigate format? I know this is a first class request and I'm sitting in coach, but this is a first class website so I'm hopeful.
