[kphinney]

Yup, I've been taken before. Learn from my mistakes. eBay has become a pretty harsh place to do business so more people are turning back to forums like this to buy, sell, and scam.
Here's two links I think everyone should read, unless you're doing the transaction face to face.

http://www.powerbookcentral.com/features/scams2.shtml

https://www.escrow.com/solutions/escrow/process.asp

That being said, someone is trying to sell me a grood deal on a PowerBook, but not willing to accept escrow.com. What should I do?

[mikellanes]

what is thier reason for not accepting the escrow? I would walk away from the deal.

[IgoByte]

I am not going ot comment on the ebay situation.

There are plenty of forums, which have been dealing with issues of fraud for a very long time now, some of the biggest of which are Anandtech and the [H]ardOCP Forums. Fraud on either one of these has been going on for as long as I can remember, but it had gotten progressively worse into 2002, especially on [H]. It was so bad at one point that I stopped visiting the [H] forums altogether - the mix of dumb kids and scammers just kinda took the fun out of it.
However, honest users of these forums have dealt with these problems. If you go over to ArsTechnica's Classifieds you will see that they have a thread for traders to watch. A lot of forums have things of this sort.
In addition to the on-forum stuff, there are also feedback sites, such as heatware, beerology (for ArsTechnica only, I believe), ebay (for people with ebay feedbacks), etc. There is also Troll Hunters, an excellent site with a list of trading tips and guidelines.

My personal advice: just be cautious...pass on ebay if you can, and if it's too good a deal to be true it probably is. Also, keep in mind that it's not just a matter of getting the item, it's also getting it in the condition that it was described to you. Many people will sell faulty items, because they don't want to hang on to them, but will not inform the buyer of any defects or potential problems. I've also seen many people advertising used items as brand new and sometimes even NIB. When making a purchase or trade, make sure you have the other party's full home address and telephone number. If need be, give them a call and judge by it. If the person you're purchasing from has very few posts on the forum and/or has no feedbacks anywhere, ask them to ship first and allow you to check the item out before paying. Make sure that in this case you make the seller feel comfortable as well. Set a time frame: say, you get the item in, have one or two days to check it out and then send the money quickly.

I've been following these rules and haven't yet been taken by anyone (at least not for a significant amount) and I hope it stays that way.

[macnnhelpme]

Yeah and just remember that Paypal protection isn't necessarily all that!

[Steve]

Thank you for editing any unnecessary posts. I deleted them out of the thread .