Again, the issue at hand isn't about making 100% up front payment or doing layaway or whatever.

Why does everyone keep focusing on that?  

It's irrelevant anyway.  50% of a huge price tag is still too much money to lose to a scammer.

Suppose I pay 50% up front for an MP5.  That doesn't mean I'll suddenly be happy to send a $15,000 check to a scammer and have it disappear.


The issue at hand is the fact that the buyers want assurance that they will actually have a gun in their hand in 9 months.

The gun sale could turn out to be a scam or the seller might change his mind or the seller might die and his family might try to tangle the gun up.

There are ways to avoid those disasters and it has nothing to do with making 50% payment.



The guys who are pretending that this isn't a real concern are sucking on laughing gas or something.   Seeing as how there a re a ton of scammers in the marketplace, how is not a concern?

Are we supposed to use psychic powers to figure out sales are legitimate?  Because we're all so old school?

The guys who insist that we need to buy and sell these guns the same way we did when they were $1000 are being silly.  Things change all the time.

This isn't a ancient rain dance festival where we must honor the traditions.  $30,000 is not the same as $1,000.  It's a new world.


Now if you want to stick your tune and insist that the buyer just send a check to you with no bill of sale and no assurance that you're not a fake, then you will have way fewer interested people.

As these guns climb and climb in price, the number of people dumb enough to just whip out a check to a stranger is going to shrink.

You might say, who cares, all I need is one buyer.  Good luck with that.

So anyway, if you're a buyer, I very strongly urge you to verify the gun sale is legitimate and to write up a good solid bill of sale.

If you can't see the gun in person, get the seller to take a cell phone video, that will knock 99.999% of the scammers out.

Or, come up with something more clever than that.


Or, you can be real old school and he-man about it and send a check for $25,000 to "Fred Smith" of Kansas and cross your fingers.

Because that's the way we always did it when MAC10s were $200.

So we still need to do it that way.

Because we already beat to death how to avoid scam. Plane Tickets, reputable dealers, etc.,  were already mentioned in this thread.

Yeah, we covered that too. As I postulated, the market will change as prices go higher. It is inevitable. Some will still cling to the "my way or the highway" method, but they will find it harder and harder to get top dollar, as more and more buyers will reject that. So they will either have to change, or accept less.

I have only sold 7 or 8 MGs.

And when I did, it was only to fund other MGs. Nothing very rare, so if they sold great if not, oh well.

I would offer 100% up front of 50/50 plus $500.

a cell phone video would be easy, and so would a youtube video of the gun running at the range.