This comment on Ask MetaFilter is the sort of insightful observation that makes you stop and think.

Ludicrously-obvious scammers seem to be pretty popular these days. They’ll contact you wanting your item, but they’re on vacation, so they’re going to have their assistant send you a money order, and send you some extra money on the money order for the trouble.

(The way this scam works is that your bank will accept the money order and credit your account the amount. You ship the goods. But then, maybe a week later, the processing center does its thing and catches that the money order is actually fake, and reverses the transaction, taking the money back out of your account. You’ve already shipped the goods off.)

While discussing how scammers seem to get more and more obvious, “MattD” came in with a neat post pointing out that it’s lowering our defenses. This guy’s not paying by money order, it must be real. This guy will meet me in person, it must be real. This guy doesn’t speak broken English, it must be real.

And then, another interesting point: “The list of 32″ televisions for sale pretty much doubles as a list of nearly-new-in-box 50″ flat panels to steal.”

Just thought I’d pass on the neat post, because it was really pretty insightful.