Because tons of scammers are doing the same thing and internally at Pinside HQ dots are being connected.

Unfortunately, Paypal auth has been disabled. I'm not sure what's been going on lately, but the Paypal verification method no longer seems to be a reliable method to ensure someone is a legit person. The way this used to work was that PayPal did the heavy lifting by verifying people for us (using bank account validation). We simply read out the "verified" flag from these linked PayPal accounts. But these past few weeks we've been seeing an increasing number of (hacked?) PayPal accounts being used to verify people.

And then recently, someone got scammed for a pretty hefty sum. That really bums me out quite a lot. I take this stuff very seriously and want to protect members in this community from getting scammed.

I'm currently figuring out alternative ways of verifying sellers and keeping the Pinside marketplace the safest space on the internet to trade pinball machines.

Note! It's important to note that scammers are not just posting games for sale on the Market place. They now also contact folks privately (mostly newbies with wanted ads). And they're getting pretty clever at it too. They know the basics of pinball - at least well enough to be somewhat convincing. The internet (and even Pinside) provides them with tons of photos and descriptions to use. They seem to get more convincing every day.

I am actively developing new methods to detect scammers. Mostly technical stuff, but I will also work on educating (newbie) users. E.g. the new warning banner we now display under PMs from new Pinside members.