on-line selling

I'm not the most experienced user of eBay and the on-line selling/buying craze. I've only bought a few items from eBay until recently. I heard about a cool local service called Craigslist, http://sacramento.craigslist.org/, that was a local posting board for free. A friend of my wife recommended it and told of how easy it was to use. I posted two items out there last week and one guy called and then decided not to buy. There was another person who wanted the same item, but it sounded fishy. This guy wanted to buy the item at the listed price and pay for it via Western Union. I would then hand off the item to a courier who would pick it up for him. Once the other guy dropped out of the running, I decided to give this weirdo a try. As soon as I gave him the information, sure enough an e-mail arrived from what appeared to be Western Union telling me that I could expect a money order in a few days. It felt phony right away, but my desire to sell the item held out hope. The guy had already scheduled FedEx for a pickup the following day, but I wasn't sure about it now. I went back and re-read the messages from Western Union and the text appeared to be written in somewhat broken English. I was pretty sure that it was some kind of scam so I wrote the guy back and said that I wasn't going to send it until I actually received the money order and cashed it. I then went out of the internet and sure enough, all it took was a search for Western Union BidPay and a scam where a buyer posing as Western Union shipping to Nigeria (I know, crazy huh?) was looking for suckers. That confirmed it for me since the shipping label this kook sent me was for Nigeria.

I guess the moral is to beware of something that appears too good to be true.