Somewhat tangential - but one of my friends used to buy lots of concert tickets off Craigslist - but he had one simple rule - he’d only buy them unless the seller emailed from a corporate or school email account - it was pretty simple and effective - how is Facebook marketplace worse than Craigslist
I'm curious how Craigslist is bad? I'm a regular user and love the functionality of CL. I'm certainly aware of the many scammers operating on CL but have found them to be rather easy to spot and avoid. Of course, I have a rule - always meet in person and test the item. I'm not aware of anybody shipping items in CL which is where many of these problems arise.
FWIW - I collect vintage portable music players (minidisc, CD, DAT, cassette, 8CM CD) as well as analog music (vinyl, cassette, etc). There are so many old guys on CL selling stuff they see as useless junk - its an amazing resource. I have a rather ridiculous amount of minidisc players and recorders purchased for as little as $10 - often in immaculate condition.
eBay is another matter - but I haven't been scammed on that platform in many years. I think they are doing something right.
Craigslist knows there are are lot of scams and so when you go to contact a seller they give a big warning that there are scams and so avoid them. Facebook accepts ad from scammers but gives you no warning that they do that. And not just things that marketplace, but they also accept ads from scammers and redirect you do their website for the scam - without any warning that it could be a scam.
I refuse to buy from Facebook because they mix things so that things that it seems I shouldn't have to beware of could be scams. I don't mind buying from a potential scammer - but I'll take extra action if I have reason to worry, which in turn means if you are not local to me I won't buy from you. There are a lot of things that I cannot get locally though, so I have to buy from someone who might or might not be scamming me, there I look for signs that it is not a scam - and there Facebook is not helpful in separating out scams from legitimate companies.
I recall years ago I tried to sell something via Craigslist (it was like a 7" LCD monitor with a serial touchscreen, back before cheap touch devices were everywhere), and someone started sending me all a whole song-and-dance of fake postal order documents and insisting I mail the device out. No.
