There are Scammers Among Us

One of the criticisms of the Warrior Forum (both within and without the forum) is that there are scammers trying to sell people junk.

While it may be a fair question to ask if more can be done to get rid of scammers, the Warrior Forum is not alone in having scammers trying to sell their questionable wares.

There are scammers on Craigslist.

There are scammers on eBay.

There are scammers on Amazon.

There are scammers on the Internet.

Should we not use any of those sites because a small number of sellers are scammers?

There are scammers in real life too.

Yesterday, on the news, there was a story about a store owner who was approached by two customers, whom he recognized, to buy some furniture they had for sale.

So, he went with them to check out their goods and, along the way, one of them got him in a chokehold and the other grabbed all his money from his pockets.

Should he now not trust any of his customers now because two of them turned out to be crooks?

Even sellers can be scammed!

It is typically a small number of crooks that end up forcing people and sites to change their ways and make things more difficult for legitimate sellers. Meanwhile, the crooks adapt and the legitimate business people get strangled by more restrictions. For the most part, most scammers eventually get caught but some always seem to manage to slip through or skirt their way around rules or regulations.

The thing is that, no matter how restrictive places get, there is no 100% guaranteed way to prevent anyone from being scammed, unless they don't buy anything at all. All any site can do is take measures to minimize that risk.

Much of the burden falls on the buyer still. Caveat emptor.

No matter where you make a purchase, do your due diligence. On a forum, you can look beyond the sale listing. You can look beyond the testimonials. You can look at the posts the seller has made. You can look at the posts the people who write glowing reviews of the product have written.

Actually, that's an advantage of a discussion forum. When I go to a site like Amazon, for example, and see their product reviews, I know nothing of the person leaving the review. Did they have a problem with the product because the product is faulty or because the buyer was a moron? Don't know. All I have to go by is the quantity of comments, which can be iffy because you don't know the people leaving the comments.

On a forum, you have the advantage of potentially knowing people better. You can see them in discussions and get an idea of what they tolerate and don't tolerate and how well their viewpoints mesh with your own.

If someone you trust recommends a product, or against a product, you have some idea of the quality of their comment. If you don't know the person commenting on a product, you can look them up. See what other products they liked. Compare. Examine. Do they like every product someone gives them a review copy of? Or, are they selective?

You can look at their general forum posts to see what type of people they are. Both sellers and reviewers. For example, if you find a post where a seller is asking if it's okay to lift articles from websites and article directories and tweak them a bit and slap their own name on them, you might not want to purchase their "How to Write 500 Articles a Day!"* WSO.

So, no matter where you buy stuff, do your due diligence. There are scammers everywhere.

Here's another lesson, the more due diligence you do on your own, and the less you rely on a third party to do your due diligence for you, the more you will reduce your chances of being scammed or falling for a scam.


*I made that up. Any similarity to any WSO past or current is purely coincidental.