What's the deal w/ all the unreal Ebay actions?

[Tim Greer]

[ QUOTE ]
As bogus as these seem to you, there are actually some folks who fall for them. Case in point. Not long ago, a self pro-claimed supercar broker sent several thousand dollars, in cash, through the USPS, to a person who he had never met. The car in question was A Yenko Deuce being sold at a much lower then market value. Turns out the seller did not own the car, and what is bad, if the buyer had checked the Deuce information listed on this site, and/or contacted us, would have known that the seller had much of the information in his ad wrong, including the color. As is usually the case, if it is too good to be true, it is simply that.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, there's no doubt that this sort of thing exists out there, I was just mainly curious if anyone know of, heard of, had any experience with, or had any theories about why this is so frequent. Such as, I wasn't sure if either one of my assumptions were the true or likely reason.

I did notice, however, that most of these seemed to ask people to not use the ebay "ask seller a question" form and pointed them to off-ebay contact methods, such as posting a specific email address for people to contact instead, claiming ebay's mail system doesn't always send email. Ironically, they are asking people to email free, web based email accounts, which, in all likelihood are less likely to always receive email--not to mention make it more difficult to track fraud.

So, I don't mean to say that it's a matter of knowing better because of these strange tactics I saw, or that if it's too good to be true, but I was simply wondering the reason... if I was correct in my assumption, or if there was another reason for it, since I see it so much when I bother to check eBay (which isn't very often), so I only really just noticed when I saw some of the more obvious deceptive looking posts. Sorry for being so verbose in my post; I'm too tired to try and condense it. :-)