Looking at your spare furniture and seeing dollar signs? Wondering how much that ornate/ugly set of gift dishes from Aunt Martha could be worth?
Welcome to the economic meltdown, where folks who have never before used the EBay auction site or Craigslist online classifieds might be looking for ways to generate extra cash by selling household items.
Alternatively, people who find themselves stretching dollars could turn to these Internet services to buy used instead of new.
But beware. EBay, Craigslist and similar sites are scam territory. Though the vast majority of person-to-person online transactions come off without a hitch, scams are pervasive enough that both sites publish online warnings.
Newbies need to be especially careful, said Ina Steiner, co-founder of the AuctionBytes online newsletter.
"When people start to sell things because they need the money," Steiner said, "that's when they're the most vulnerable.
"If they're the victim of a scam, it can be devastating."
The EBay auction site used to take mostly a hands-off approach to scams perpetrated by sellers or buyers. Its basic position in the early days was that the site provided the means for auctions to occur and collected fees for that service. The actual deals were made by humans who had to sort out problems themselves.
But negotiating a solution between two strangers -- who might be a country or even several countries and an ocean apart -- can be dicey.
This led to bad feelings among people who got burned, and EBay, which makes a substantial part of its income on seller fees, could no longer be a mostly disinterested party.
"If they don't protect consumers," said Rich LaMagna, a security consultant who does work for EBay, "it's not good for business."
Beginning last week, EBay took one of the most dramatic consumer protection steps in its history by switching to all-paperless transactions. Now, the only acceptable forms of payment for most transactions are credit cards and the PayPal and ProPay electronic processing systems.
The paperless system wipes out check and money-order frauds as long as sellers and buyers follow the rules. The switch to paperless also, perhaps not coincidentally, is a possible money maker for EBay. PayPal, which collects fees from sellers on the transactions it processes, is owned by the auction site.
