1.
Buyer
BEWARE!
Do your due diligence!
If you feel like you got ripped off, or the package arrived
damaged, or whatever, before you e-mail me complaining about it
ask yourself if you did a proper amount of due diligence.
Nobody forced you to buy anything, and I literally have begged
everyone over the past decade to be very, very careful buying
anything used off the internet. The responsibility IS ON YOU
the buyer and YOU THE SELLER to smell around each other's tails
enough to where you're both comfortable with the transaction.
Don't kid yourself and assume that there aren't criminals
searching the site on an hourly basis trying to figure out how to
scam you out of your money.
Do your homework, or at the very
least don't send more money than you are willing to lose.
Do you know how many items I've
bought off VAF? Off eBay? Off FB marketplace?
Zero. I worked in I.T.
for a quarter century. My squelch is set pretty high.
2.
You own a smart phone and/or computer. Use FaceTime/Zoom/Skype and make a
video recording (instructions below) of both the seller's face
and the product they are selling. You'll need permission
from them to do this.
Have the person
hold the item(s) being sold up and spin it around so you can see them and
the item (and the wife and kids in the background).
Maybe they can show you a water bill. Have them verify the
house number outside and show you the street sign. I'm not telling you you
have
to do all this, but if you think buying a used multi-thousand
dollar piece of avionics on an internet classified board is
without risk, I would suggest you are a
much braver person than me.
If they're not willing to talk on the phone via
video chat and show
you their face while holding the avionics, you can rest assured
you are communicating with a scammer.
Tell them you're going to record video and audio before
you press record. Get permission.
If you use a Mac laptop or Mac
computer you can record video and audio with a couple of
clicks. How to
HERE. Youtube will show you how to do this on a
Windows based machine.
How to Record On an iPhone.
Bring up the
Control Center and look for the button circled in
red below (how
to add the Record button to your Control Center).
Start the video chat session by LONG PRESSING this button
- doing this allows you to turn on the microphone to your phone/iPad. It will record everything being displayed on your phone as a video file. Go back to that
button after you stop the video chat and press it again
to stop recording. You now have the person's face,
house, voice,
and the item being sold.
Sounds like a lot of work, but it's nice to have a
video and audio of the person
who is trying to sell you a $5,000 piece of avionics, $30K
engine, or $150K plane.
This precaution is free and in your
pocket. Just
saying...
Ok, so you want to buy and
you feel pretty confident it's a legit person. Ask
yourself if you're willing to loose thousands of dollars to a
incredibly motivated and sneeky criminal eliment. If not,
let's proceed to step #3. The most important point on this
page.
3. Expect Hi Res Photos ...hosted
somewhere online.
If
you are selling an item, use the
macro function on your digital camera (it will most
likely look like a little flower) to take extremely close-up
photographs of every square inch of the item being sold. The
macro function will allow you to show every little scratch and
nick and wear point in painfully excruciating detail. This
will avoid the unpleasant "you didn't tell me how worn out it
looked" conversation after receiving it.
The person selling
should use an image hosting site (smugmug.com
will give you a two week FREE
subscription) to upload HIGH RES PHOTOS for potential buyers.
If
the seller is unwilling to upload high-resolution images (and
I'm talking a dozen pictures from all sides), including pictures
with THEM holding the item, I would recommend
running away from the deal as fast as you can. This one
simple act costs the seller nothing and minimizes the chance of
confusion down the road.
4. No links to eBay,
Barnstormers, Trade-A-Plane, etc.
No exceptions. These are
deleted by the mods.
5. Search Engines Are Your Friend
Google (or equivalent) the item that's being sold. You might find that it
appears on several different online bulletin boards, and that
the seller has already been outed as a scammer.
Google the
seller's email address. You might be surprised that it appears
on a scam list somewhere. No hits whatsoever? Might
be a scammer's new 'burner address'.
NOTE:
SCAMMERS MAKE THINGS UP ONLINE. DON'T NECESSARILY TRUST
WHAT YOU READ.
6.
Document the Packaging Before It's
Shipped
If it is a large item like a tail kit, or something that
requires proper readying for shipping, make sure the seller sends you
detailed pictures of the item in its packaging container to
satisfy you that it is been packed correctly. Things get dropped
during shipping. Trucks bounce around. Insurance is your friend.
Surely you took out some sort of
insurance for shipping, right? The buyer and the
seller negotiated that in advance, right?
7. Give yourself a way to 'cancel the
check'
Pay using something like PayPal.com. Something you can cancel if
things go south. If the seller demands the funds in advance and
it's avionics, I would run away from the deal unless somebody
like Stein acted as an intermediary. But hey, it's your
money not mine.
8. Save every piece of correspondence
You might need it to give to the Police. Or your lawyer.
NOTE:
SCAMMERS MAKE THINGS UP ONLINE. DON'T NECESSARILY TRUST
WHAT YOU READ.
9. Question a Low Post Count
If a seller only has a few posts, and/or they are all items
for sale, your red flag should go up instantly. And high.
NOTE:
SCAMMERS MAKE THINGS UP ONLINE. DON'T NECESSARILY TRUST
WHAT YOU READ.
10. Don't send more money than you
are willing to loose
You're buying something used off the internet, after all.
Do your homework.
Please!
In closing, you might think I would be very
comfortable buying and selling items on my own website classified
board. I am not. Would I buy a propeller sight unseen from another
state, trusting that it would be shipped correctly and show up
exactly as I was hoping? Not in a hundred years. Would I
buy a $2,000 GPS sight unseen without doing any due diligence? And I
mean a lot of due diligence. Not on your life.
Use the
RV White Pages to
find somebody who lives near the item being sold. Ask them if they
would be willing to go look at the item to make sure everything is
legitimate. Send them money for a nice dinner out.
Sorry to sound like such a stick in the mud,
but it seems like every few months somebody gets ripped off buying
an expensive piece of avionics gear, or a propeller, or an engine
that has had a prop strike, etc. To be honest I'm kind of getting
tired of getting the e-mails from people who somehow think I need to
be involved because they failed to do their own
research before shelling out the money. If it seems like it's too
good of a deal to be true, it almost always is. In nearly 100%
of these cases, I've never met the two parties involved, they live
in different states, and I know nothing about them or the item.
I think in 20 years I've bought two items
off of my classified board, and I think they both cost around $20.
Maybe my threshold for risk is higher than the average person. Maybe
not.
Don't give your password to anyone.
Ever. Don't 'click on this link to reset your password' that gets
e-mailed to you by someone that you think you know. It's a
phishing scam. Don't click on a link PM'd to you asking you
for your password. Ever. It's a phishing scam. Make yourself
aware that identity theft and online scams are very real and a way
of life these days. We are a huge community. We
are a target.
