Hello Friends,
Just a message to beware of who you sell your dresses to. I have successfully sold 3 dresses on ballroom dancers.com, but i just had an incedent of selling one more, and the buyer sent me a counterfeit check. Thank god I didn't send the dress.
Please get your questions answered before you send any dresses or costumes, including who the buyer dances with, what studio, what company, who is their teacher.
This guy said it was for a friend of his. Then he sent me a check for WAY to much money and asked that I return the money to someone else.
Please, please know who your buyer is. If my bank hadn't caught it, i'd be out $5000.00

This scam has been going on for quite some time -- several regular ballroomdancers.com posters have been approached. If you search for "forged Cashier's checks" using Google you'll find it in many other contexts than just ballroom dresses. This con game has been used for buying and selling horses, antiques, collectibles, and stuff off of eBay.

Your advice about getting your questions answered and knowing your buyer is very useful.

Some red flags that you may be dealing with a scammer:

1) From their initial email it seems that they haven't actually read the ad.

2) They don't even try to bargain.

3) They want to pay with a 3rd party check.

4) They want to overpay for the dress.

5) They want you to send the dress to an address outside of your home country.

6) They refuse to reveal their address and phone number until after you've received the check.

7) They don't know the measurements of the person they are buying the dress for.

Laura

Unfortunately Carrie, this is now the norm, and to be expected when you put up a dress for sale on the internet. Laura's list of red flags is excellent, and with any experience you can usually tell who is legit and who is not. Still, it's not foolproof, and if you want to guarantee your safety you should never [b]ever[/b] conduct a transaction without the backup of an escrow service such as paypal.

Paypal is relatively simple to use, inexpensive (in fact, it can cost you nothing at all if you factor the price into the sale price of your costume), and gives you complete security. So why anyone would refuse it is beyond me. Whatever the reasons happen to be, the scammers are well aware of this fact, and prey on those who don't use it.

We give plenty of warning when you first attempt to submit a costume ad -- not about the methods of any particular scammer, but about the reality of fraud and the measures you should take to prevent it. So while my heart goes out to anybody who loses money this way, you can't say we didn't warn you.

As always, I strongly urge all of you to use an escrow service for every single transaction. Ignore my advice at your own risk. If I continue to hear about people falling for these scams, I will change our program so that the usage of an escrow service is mandatory.

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com

Accepting only PayPal for payment is an excellent idea -- most of my transactions over the past few years have been via PayPal. PayPal is free so long as you aren't accepting credit cards. If you do want to accept credit cards, you can figure out in advance how much the fees will be and add that to the cost of the dress. It's not too bad, about 3% if I recall correctly. I've never actually had someone pay by credit card yet, rather, they pay by direct transfer from a checking of savings account that they have hooked up to PayPal. Still, PayPal really does make it easy.

One thing to watch with regarding PayPal is (you guessed it), fraud. I get phoney emails all the time with the PayPal logo telling me I have to click some link and reverify my credit card or checking account or password or whatever. If you look carefully at the link by parking your mouse on it and seeing what turns up in the bar at the bottom of your browser, you'll usually see that these links go to web sites that aren't actually PayPal. They're tricks to try to get you to give away personal information. Believe me, if PayPal needs something from you they will tell you when you go directly to their web site and then log yourself in -- they don't ask via emails for that kind of information.

The problem with Paypal is that they act like a bank, but have so far managed to avoid being subject to the same consumer-protection laws as banks. So if paypal gets suspicious about your account, they can freeze your money for an outrageous amount of time, and there's not really anyone outside the company you can complain to.

This is true -- I've read stories about people who weren't doing anything actually wrong at all who had their accounts frozen. This hasn't happened to me though, and I'm very pleased with PayPal's service.