This is 100% a Facebook thing. Facebook is a crap knife 'community' primarily populated by young and ignorant people following the latest Instawhatever knife trends, posting curated photos of their 'EDC' gear that is primarily man jewelry, and day trading knives. A lot of them have lots of 'vouches' because they literally buy and sell hundreds of knives they also know nothing about. They're paranoid about doing business with each other because of the prevalence of scammers, yet the majority of them sell on Facebook because they believe that they should not have to pay to sell their own property, so they also scam Paypal through abuse of F&F payments, which is the normally demanded form of payment for Facebook knife sales.
I am a member on several of the Facebook knife buy/sell/trade groups. A lot of good folks are on there, too, but the good folks who are on there are also on the forums, where buying, selling, and trading is less hassle because you deal with fewer total morons. I would sell knives to morons, but I would never, ever, in a thousand years buy a knife from someone on Facebook.
Note: This applies to the EDC and general knife B/S/T groups. Some specific makers have good Facebook communities with good B/S/T groups, but they tend to be smaller and focused on specific custom makers or midtech/production companies.
Note 2: Here's a hint for dealing on Facebook - if someone's girlfriend is selling knives, it's probably because her boyfriend is a known scammer who can't use his own profile anymore because everyone knows who he is. If someone's profile pictures are all of them shirtless in the bathroom or posts of their EDC vaping gear, they're a frickin' moron and you should ignore them, because you're about to get scammed.
Rant 3: Also overwhelming Facebook people are crap sellers. Some of them are crap sellers not because they're bad people themselves, but because they inherit crap selling habits from their crap community. A typical Facebook sale post has two cell phone pictures and may not even have text describing what the knife even is, much less its condition. If you ask the seller what condition it is in, he'll tell you "NIB" even though he sharpened and carried it and is the fourth owner. When you get the knife, assuming you actually get the knife, it'll have been dropped in a flat-rate envelope without insurance and be rattling around loose.
