Hi Hope. I'm not much of a public forum person, I'm afraid. I'll post 'sold' once in a while but that's about it for me. Nevertheless, I thought I had some relevant input on this topic, so here goes.
I ran into Hamid Novotel yesterday, although his name was Paul to me. I was doing a background check on one of the NNN.nets for sale here and came across his posting for 433.net for $500 at another forum. Not the deal of the century, but not too bad. The whois record checked out with his email address and $500 is under my 'do-it-with-escrow' cut-off amount, so I thought, why not?
I PayPal'd him $500 and he sent back a message politely asking me to wait an hour and not to worry. It was an odd thing to say, so at that point, I went into panick mode and did a more thorough background check. Luckily, I came across this posting and quickly put a dispute claim on the transaction. Afterwards, I got a nervous email from Mr Novotel asking me what I'd done to his account. I sent him a firm message back and I never heard from him after that.
I figured all I'd have to do at this stage was contact PayPal and Hotmail, alert them to the fact that a fraudster was operating in their midst, get my money released back to me and wait for notification that Mr Novotel was about to receive a sound spanking from a couple of internet giants.
Of course, that wasn't the case. PayPal doesn't seem to care. If my claim checks out, they might release my funds back to me. Maybe - they don't like electronic purchases. At best, they'll remit my funds but won't be punishing the seller. At worst, they'll actually release my funds to a known fraudster, give him a pat on the back and send him on his way. That blows my mind. Hotmail gave me an automated response. I'm not expecting to hear from them.
Oh well, to be honest, I don't care about the money. My girlfriend can rip through that amount in an hour on a shopping trip, and besides, I read somewhere that you're not a real domainer until you've been ripped off
