I have sold items here and on ebay for years using paypal with no probs.

However - have just had someone try and rip me off.

They were 'unable' to do a bank transfer because they were at sea ... marine engineer.

They were buying privately sight unseen for someone else - i.e. no actual shipping address.

Apparently this is a not uncommon scam.

They do the transfer but it doesn't go into your account for 7 days - they then organise a private pickup with no recognised courier tracking slip within the 7 day time period

They then claim either goods faulty or not delivered - you have no proof and paypal refund their money - and you lose your board

BTW don't sell to a marine engineer called Gina!! Fortunately I smelt a rat in time

here is a link if you are interested to other similar stories

cheers Neil

jakebillo.com/more-scams-how-you-can-get-ripped-off-using-paypal/

A mate put a car up on gumtree, and in one week had 12 different people contact him working "away" ! He knew the scam and never replied and report all of them. The funny one was some friends earlier this year got done selling a $3000 mirage on gumtree, they had no idea about the scam and had to change all the bank accounts because his wife fell for it.

Its been happening for a long time now.

Tell you what though it makes it bloody hard for us that are actually at sea to buy things. Whenever we do you can hear the laughing as you type. You then have to go into the full story that youre a real person and you really are working out here for the next month etc etc. I'd like to know how many real sales have been lost when people just delete our messages ha ha. And believe me we buy piles of stuff when offshore! So maybe dont delete straight away!

A lot of banks now require a passcode to transfer to a new 3rd party bank account. This passcode is sent via sms to your phone. But if you're working at sea (or in a lot of mine sites) you don't have mobile reception to receive the message, so can't do bank transfers.

You can't even call up the bank and ask for this sms procedure to be turned off. Can be quite frustrating if you forget to pay your bills when you're at home!!