It started back when I developed a sick fascination with the Missed Connections section, and to this day I’m still sitting with my foam 1 fan finger waiting for that Missed Connection that says my favorite thing an anonymous classified could say: “I saw you at Safeway and thought you were cute. Write me back if you get this.” Awesome. They’re really THAT vague.

And of course, I loved finding a girl who was looking for one friend of mine on there, and finding a guy who was ranting about someone a friend of mine took home from a bar. I still giggle when I think about that 

The lovelorn stopped being enough for my Craigslist high – so I decided my life needed a daily injection of bike pics, so I started hitting the motorcycles for sale, and since it was right next to them, eventually music instruments and photo/video equipment. Of course, electronics and computer stuff had to make the list too, because, well, I wear my geek pride like a Miss Teen USA sash — which I could totally buy on Craigslist, since anyone winning Miss Teen USA will need money for rehab once they realize they can’t really do anything about world peace. See how I brought that full circle?

I’ve been the king of commerce, selling 2 TVs, 2 digital SLR cameras, a motorcycle, Social Distortion tickets and a PS3 in the past year, and with more stuff up for sale now, I get a TON of replies. However, a lot of people, and when I say “a lot” I actually just mean a few here and there, are Craigslist evildoers. They’re different from the Craigslist ne’er-do-wells and the Craigslist nogoodnicks. They want your money, or your stuff, but here’s the rub, they don’t want to trade you their stuff or money for it.

I know, right?

A few want me to ship their item to a cousin in Nigeria, and they’ll pay me an extra $100 in a UScertified bond checks. Or, they want me to use their escrow service, Royal Mail, which involves me calling a premium toll number in Belize (like $50/minute) since I don’t have to pay for the item until I’ve inspected it, but I still have to send them money to “release” the item for inspection.

Snopes.com has been my buddy, as well as the helpful Craigslist scam pages, because while I don’t be a part of anything that doesn’t involve a cash deal in-person, I like to know how all of this stuff works so I can explain it to the great unwashed who don’t like to do research as much as I do. Now thanks to me, these bad people won’t be making the baby Jesus cry. We’ll let “2 Girls 1 Cup” do that.

I’d like to think people will heed this warning and learn from my experience, but let’s face it – most people roaming the web spend too much time wiping the drool off their keyboards to check into a dubious offer. If you don’t like to look up the weird emails you get from buyers, hey, no problem. I’ll just send you a cashier’s check for your DVD player for $8000 signed over to you, if you could just cash it and send me the balance minus $200 for your troubles, well that’d be just swell.

No?

Oh come on… even though our eyes met at Safeway last week?