My cats got my back but that’s a good point. By the time I finalize the deal I have a pretty good idea that it’s safe.
If someone starts talking about texting and codes I say have a nice day, we’re done.
Seems like big red flags, if more people could recognize that scammers would be out of business pretty quick.
Now now. It’s only a scam if you click on it.
[If you’re still looking, or will be looking for puzzles again, I highly recco Bits And Pieces - Buy Jigsaw Puzzles, Puzzle Accessories, Holiday Gifts & Decor
Mom & I began buying from them in the 90s and their service and goodies are always great. One xmas I was really mad at mom, so I got her a 1200 pc puzzle of Notre Dame’s Rose Window from B&P. It infuriated her b/c maddeningly difficult, and she bitched the whole time, but eventually completed it. XD]
Whaddya mean “now”?! It’s been fulla crap and scammers for ages.
Mom once insisted I check out a women’s clothing site faceschnook’d been pushing at her. She sent me links to a couple of their things, but I had to log in to the site before I could view them. She told me her username and pw, I logged in, and nothing was to my taste (which she shoulda known), and everything was way too expensive. She told me to check out another site they pushed at her, and something was messed up there, too, but I don’t recall what/how. I told her to stop sending me sites from faceschnook, and also explained she shouldn’t be clicking on that crap anyway, and amazingly enough, she quit.
She went back to shopping with me on ebay, where we found clothes that made both of us happy and cost loads less.
My experience with CL and marketplace is that the class of thing you are trying to buy/sell depends on how scammy the other side is. For example, buying and selling kids/baby stuff is usually no problem. Over the years, we’ve probably bought and sold $1000s (mostly on CL, but a little bit on marketplace). We’re at the stage now where we just leave our bundle outside and ask the buyer to just stick the cash through our mail slot. Not a single problem yet.
And the few times I’ve tried to deal with electronics (even things that are much lower dollar value than the clothes and toys), it always seems like I’m dealing with someone I can’t let my guard down on.
Shopping on Amazon for my daughter’s birthday presents, I was scratching my head over the jigsaw puzzles too. Specifically the wooden puzzles where the pieces are shaped like animals. There seems to be so many sellers with a similar product, it immediately made me wonder which was going to be decent quality. The descriptions were all weird copypasta and the product photos just a smidge lo-res, and they all trash-talked the competition in the same weirdly specific way. I googled them all to see if they had legit 1st party websites, and finally determined that Unidragon seemed to be the original / most legit, and bought one of those.
Also on Amazon I was looking for stuffed dragons and came across a raft of sellers all trying to sell an incredible looking flexible stuffed dragon from Raya. All the sellers had random strings of letters for their seller names, lo-res images and all charged $29 dollars. Finally I found one with a 1 star review who called out the scam and name-checked the ACTUAL maker from whom all the product shots and description had been lifted. The real artist is a Russian dollmaker who makes them by hand for $600/pop. It seems hard to believe that Amazon couldn’t have detected these obvious frauds…
Things that made me go HMMM: Site claimed the model was custom built, but the ‘Tracking’ was posted within an hour, indicating that they were pregenerating tracking. Site had no contact information besides an e-mail address, no phone or physical address. Tracking never became active even after several weeks. Contact information kept changing, with several different names being used for PayPal/site contact. The story on the shipping kept changing; they told me it had already been shipped and they could not cancel my order, they asked me to be patient while they built it, they couldn’t refund me. At this time, the website that was supposedly making these models has been shut down.
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