I've seen more and more forums, selling sites etc. ban sellers from asking for FF payments. That said usually all that means is that sellers won't specify and you'll find out they only take FF. For a long time the only options were checks/MO's and they didn't come with payment guarantees but I admit if someone will only take FF payments, I usually avoid the sale. Since we require folks to pay for memberships here to sell stuff, it's probably less common to find scammers like say facebook or other general forums. I see all sorts of sellers at gun shows, expos, etc. refusing to take anything but FF payments or cash now. If there's one thing the gov't loves it's getting their $.
With probably 10s if not 100s of thousands of folks hiding income using paypal/venmo etc. I suspect the IRS and it's $80 billion in new funding, is going to put a stop to it pretty quickly. It's not hard to figure out that someone getting a couple hundred FF payments a year is most likely hiding income. The funny part is that unless you make profit there's no taxes anyway. Buy a knife for $250 and sell it for $200, you owe nothing. I keep reading forums with people freaking out about how you prove you sold it at a loss, and my guess is the IRS is going to take you at your word. Let's face it, when was the last time the IRS came knocking asking you to prove how much you bought the last car you sold for was? I've never heard of it happening.
At the end of the day consumers as a group are the power powerful and stupidest mass at the same time. All people would have to do is stop agreeing to buy things with FF payments and sellers would have to change.
Scammers are everywhere now, ETSY is the new hangout for them, they market themselves as US sellers, but when you buy something you find out it's being drop shipped from China. Lots of people are getting caught out by this one now. They've also learned all the loopholes in Paypal's policies. For example a common theme is they spoof a website for a popular product/company, link you from Facebook (facebook doesn't care they get their ad $). Then when you buy something, let's say it's a knife, at first they don't ship you anything hoping you'll just go away. If you contest the charge with Paypal, they ship you a $1 cell phone case. They do this because as long as the seller can show a tracking number for the item, Paypal will make you wait until it's delivered, once it's delivered you get a $1 phone case, or some other worthless junk item, so when you complain to Paypal the seller apologizes for the shipping error and Paypal's policy now requires YOU to ship it back to the seller at your cost, which can easily be $50 if you want tracking, signature etc. for a refund. Usually then the seller gives you a known non-deliverable address, so the package ends up undelivered and if you are lucky returned to you, and if not it just gets lost in the system. If you can't prove the return was delivered to the seller, they don't have to refund you by Paypal's own rules, and if they keep giving you bad addresses you keep spending your $ to return it.
