Having recently sold an iPhone on eBay and been concerned about problems like this, I wish eBay would allow non-professional sellers restrict bids to professional buyers.
Thousand times this. Their buyer filtering options are laughable.
If they were to let me limit sales to people
with certain types of addresses, purchases of certain value, a reasonable number of feedback, etc, that would be very helpful in reducing a chance of being defrauded
If they allowed that, almost all sellers would do it for security, and then there would be no ways for buyers to get any feedback.
In fact, when I was placing my first bids on eBay, some buyers would cancel the auction or retract the bids because they didn't trust me. I understand their position, but how are you supposed to get feedback if sellers won't sell you anything?
Right, which is why they should only allow non-professional/low-volume sellers to make this restriction, that way new users can still buy from pro sellers to get some reputation, or people selling in odd-ball domains where such a restriction overly harm the seller.
If you sell, say, more than 500 items a year, you turn into a professional seller and you can't be as restrictive, but you are doing enough business for the occasional scammer to not make a large impact.
Of course, I think eBay is harmed relatively little by scammers like the one in the OP; so I can see why they haven't done much to prevent it at risk of loosing real business.
If they were to let me limit sales to people with certain types of addresses, purchases of certain value, a reasonable number of feedback, etc, that would be very helpful in reducing a chance of being defrauded