[corobo]

> Partners split up, and maybe out of anger or spite one of them sells a valuable asset way below market value

By selling shop.com for $500? A 4 letter, dictionary word, extremely brandable, .com?

> Has nobody even bothered to do a whois lookup on shop.com?

No, not even you apparently. Well done. This was a lesson valued at $500, be glad it wasn't more.

[vtlynch]

Your argument is pointless. Assume that someone who was not aware that shop.com should never be available for $500 made the purchase. They deserve to be scammed? No.

The entire reason Paypal exists as a Third-Party payment processor is to ensure fairness on both sides. They failed.

[larrys]

Your point about paypal is of course correct.

Importantly though in this case the buyer knew the price was to good to be true and his greed got the best of him. Plus the thing to keep in mind is the level to which a company like paypal can protect against fraud. Might be similar to expecting that a dry cleaner should detect a forged clothing ticket perhaps. Or a restaurant should detect that another diner is using your reservation. Doesn't scale very well.

[tooltrainer]

Why is it greed and not merely taking advantage of a potential opportunity? Sheesh the morality police are really out in force today.

[larrys]

Perhaps greed is the wrong word here. (By the way I am definitely not the morality police that is for sure..I have no problem with people making money practically any way they can)

I think your good judgement was clouded by what you though was an opportunity to make a large sum of money. As such you let your guard down. And ignored common sense.

For example, let's say you are on assignment for the US Government and you have a bunch of secrets in your briefcase. (Or you work for Google, whatever). You go to a bar and a super attractive hot woman (or man) strikes up a conversation with you. You are nowhere near attractive or rich or smart enough to have this women she is a 12 and you can only score 5's and that's if the woman is drunk. (let's hypothesize). So your brain should be saying "danger Will Robinson" [1] but instead it thinks "wow she likes me I'm surprised but hey anything can happen!!!". And the next thing you know she has walked off with your suitcase of secrets. What do they call that? A Honey Pot? Whatever. My point is perhaps greed is the wrong word so what is the word to describe what I am talking about here? After all you knew this was to good to be true and almost certainly not true however you did it anyway.

By the way I don't buy into that whole "to good to be true probably is" line it all depends on the circumstances. However what you did here was clearly someone outsmarted you, they knew paypal better than you did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger,_Will_Robinson

[corobo]

And yours is flawed. This is a guy that is saying he wanted to snag the domain to squat on it. He knows the value of domains. My comment exists only due to that

The lesson to take away is more "Use an escrow service and do due diligence" rather than "haha you got scammed"

Side note - author got his money back. Everyone wins!

[tooltrainer]

Actually I did all of that. But of course I saw the current, legit whois info which is what I would expect to see before I had purchased.

[corobo]

No red flags when you checked the whois and saw it wasn't hosted with godaddy? What were you checking for if not the current registrar at least?