In our last part we covered how you might go about selling your lesser-used stuff online (click here). Most of the time things go as planned and both buyer and seller make out. The seller (you) is happy because they now have some cold, hard cash to replenish their stuff-collection, the buyer is happy because they’ve gotten a nice piece of equipment at a good price.

But, as in everyday life, there are many people of nefarious-character who’d like to get something for nothing….

Buying and selling from trusted resellers (like Amazon or Ebay) is your first line of defense. As we said last-time, these Marketplace providers go a long way to protect both buyers and sellers as well as their reputation.

Things that these sites will provide you with are payment options that protect both parties and helps avoid bad-checks and credit card fraud.

<> Many times with a large (legitimate) vendor you can count on this hard-earned reputation to protect you as they will do anything within their power to protect it.
One of the biggest ways people will try and defraud you, the seller, are Phishing scams where they try to get info from you, or convince you that they’re actually Amazon or Pay-pal and get you to send them the merchandise they’ve “bought”.

<> They’ll send you e-mails with legitimate looking logos and banners. They can just simply copy these logos from a legitimate-site and paste them onto e-mails they make look similar to the real site. I’ve seen e-mails from Pay-pal, asking for the user’s sensitive information (like pay-pal passwords or bank-account info), that were very hard to tell from the real thing.

Thanksfully, if you look at the web-address of these fraudulent e-mails, they usually have additional or different info than the legitimate sites (as, so far, no 2 places can have the same address).

Things like “http://www.paypal.com/ru” (ru is the internet-country-code for Russia) or “http:www.paypal.com/paymenow” might be a tip off that this is a bogus communique and should be reported to the company you’re dealing with (like Pay-pal in this example) and placed in your spam folder.

Read the security sections of these vendors closely. They usually tell you what address they’ll use to send info to you, the seller, with (like Amazon is always “http://www.amazon.com”) And what they will (and more importantly will-not) ask for in their correspondence with you.

Also, if you see a country code that isn’t in the country where the vendor your dealing with is located, that’s usually a tip-off. Most of the time, these codes will be from countries in the Central and Eastern Bloc areas, Africa, and the Carribean.

Another similar thing to watch out for are e-mails that are formatted to look like legitimate “Sold” e-mails. I’ve gotten quite a few of these while selling thru Amazon (it’s far from an Amazon only problem…I’ve just sold thru Amazon a lot) and it’s usually quite simple to prove or dis-prove the legitimacy of these e-mails.

With Amazon, if your item is truly sold, they’ll not only send you an e-mail telling you to “ship it now!”, but they’ll also no longer display your item for sale. This is something that no hooligan can currently do.

So, before you immediately run down to UPS and ship off your camera to some unknown place, verify that the buyer is legitimate.

If not, contact Amazon’s security and send them the info they request to help catch these theives.

Amazon also will allow prospective-buyers to ask you questions about your article for sale. This is usually in the form of e-mails which are sent through Amazon to again protect both parties. They provide a link to respond through Amazon and to the buyer, thus protecting you from direct communication with a potential scoundrel.

Keep your responses short and to the point and don’t respond with any personal info which might give the bad-guys a way to sneak in. I’ve had e-mail discussions with what I thought were legitimate buyers asking question after question, only to see them send me one of the phony “ship it now” e-mails saying my item had been sold. A quick check of the Amazon web-site proved otherwise.

The last thing I’ll say to watch out for are where the billing-address and the shipping address don’t match. Amazon will warn you about this (only ship when both addresses match), so keep an eye out. You can also get e-mails from prospective buyers asking if they can buy it, but would you mind shipping it to their sick-cousin in Nairobi. A simple “No” is sufficient.

The main thing is to be alert (and not get caught up in the rush of salesmanship) and diligently read the on-line seller’s rules, regulations and security precautions.

So, having said all that, the on-line selling experience can really be a good thing , bringing the world to your door and allowing you to sell stuff you no longer need to someone who can use it.