Dozens of people have bought and sold flutes over the years on my site’s free “Wooden Flute Exchange” (http://www.firescribble.net/flute/exchange.html) without a hitch. But a few have been victims or near-victims of scams. I just want to alert people to this risk.
Most recently, someone selling a flute on my cite received an offer from someone in another country to buy the flute. The buyer sent the seller a cashier’s check for considerably more (a couple thousand dollars more) than the amount of the flute and asked the seller to wire back the balance. The seller was suspicious, so decided to wait until the check cleared before doing anything, which was a wise move as the check turned out to be counterfeit.
A few years ago, someone purporting to be a young girl from Nova Scotia posted an ad in the “flutes wanted to buy” page saying that she wanted a wooden flute but was too poor to afford one, and wanted to know if anyone could give her a flute. Someone took pity on her and sent her a quite nice antique flute, which promptly appeared on eBay for sale the next week.
So please be careful when buying and selling flutes through the Internet, especially on free sites such as mine that don’t have the controls offered by commercial sites such as eBay.
