Domain buying scam alert

A dear friend of mine recently replied to a thread on a well known webmaster board, to a guy looking to buy domains. She PM’d him and he immediately insisted on taking the conversation to MSN Messenger. They negotiated the deal and she sold him two names for $500. The money showed up in PayPal and she transferred the names, as has been done so many other successful times with no problem for her. 20 minutes later she received a PayPal alert that the transaction had been flagged for fraud. Bottom line is she ended up scammed out of both her domains, though PP and GoDaddy are working on it at this time.

My warning to any domainers out there, make sure you can prove who you are selling to. In this instance it was because the conversation was taken immediately to Messenger and there was no verbal detail exchange in the PM, she cannot prove the scammer is the guy in the thread, though it is obvious it is, still hard to prove.

This transaction was from Canada. It would be my recommendation that for any international PayPal domain sales, to tell the buyer they will have to wait several hours before the domain is transferred, so the payment can be verified as safe.

Hope this helps somebody. My dear friend lost two killer domains!

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