Likely scam

I seem to have been the victim of a scam. The user account is John Paddock. He advertised an Astrophysics Mach 1 mount for $2500.00. He sent photos and I had several email communications with him. He would not accept Paypal, but I agreed to pay him $173.00 via an Amazon gift card for shipping costs. After he received it he stopped communicating. I asked Amazon to revoke the payment. They are investigating.

I had the exact same scenario happen to me. As Herb mentioned, if it is too good to be true, it is not true. The first sign is no prior transactions. The second, no valid PayPal account. The third, asking to use Amazon gift certificate for shipping the item first for inspection. Beware!  Sorry this happened to you!

I think it's pretty likely Amszon will reverse the payment. I got onto it quickly.

Ahh, this just happened to me, stupid me! The "user" is "Oyoil" ("Bill East", [email protected]), exact same scenario: PayPal not working, offered to send item (iOptron IEQ45 GTN, Classified #523448) first and pay him later, then sent FedEx invoice and label and asked for shipping cost ($161) paid in amazon egift card because he said he paid with his amazon debit card.  Yeah I know, should have been all red flags when he asked for amazon egift card, but this guy's good, pretty convincing scam, especially if you've never seen it before.  Reported to amazon, and they're investigating. Will also dispute charge with CC company.  Lesson learned: ALWAYS ask for verification and NEVER pay with anything without purchase protection. And don't feel bad about questioning seemingly "honest" guy: "Bill" sounded honest too, really.

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Interesting!
I was almost ready to purchase that very mount--even considering driving down to Phoenix to pick it up.  I was corresponding with 'Bill' just this morning, but when I went to look at the ad posting again, it was not to be found anywhere on AstroMart, nor did I get his promised shipping estimate--nor could I even find his profile.  As it turns out, I decided against it anyway, since the mount looked like it wouldn't meet my payload needs after doing some research.  And then I found this forum thread.  Lucky me!

I just became a new user to AstroMart--I hope this doesn't happen too often.  I should also have been tipped off by the fact that he showed no history or profile.  Or one way to check credentials is to see if the poster has a presence on, like, Astrobin.  You would expect that someone selling specialized astrophoto equipment would have taken and posted some pics with it.

Thanks for the tipoff!  Sorry about the ripoff!

Richard