This isn't one of those "I have a blog, hear me rant" kind of posts. It's one of those "don't let this happen to you" kind of posts instead.
Let me first say, I absolutely LOVE bartertown.com. You can take unwanted gaming material, leftover bitz, and even completely unrelated stuff and exchange it for used stuff you DO want, all without messing around with ebay or paypal. And they track all the positive AND negative ratings of each person who trades, so someone doesn't get away with pulling a scam more than once.
But you still have to be cautious. I pulled a large deal the other week, roughly $500 in trade value going each way. Now they tell you to watch large trades with users that don't have an established trade history. Trade small for a while til you build up a good rep, then you're ready for larger trades. But this fellow wanted old collectible toys in exchange for some premium 40k stuff, so I took a chance.
I didn't get screwed, but I didn't get exactly what I bargained for either. I was supposed to get a large bitz box and 30-50 sprues of stuff (much of it partially used), and the fellow took pictures of most of it. But then a lot of what he described and took pics of simply wasnt' in the box I received. I'd received descriptions and pics of things like a complete techmarine, aquila lander terrain, "tons" of tyrranid sprues, etc, etc. None of that was in there. And a fair number of the sprues contained things like "one single space marine head", or "single left arm and a grenade". Plus "tons of tyrranid sprues" apparently meant "three", and mostly stripped.
Now I got enough decent stuff in there that I don't think I got screwed, as I said. I'm also not ticked off enough to out the fellow by name. (That's just bad mojo anyway, and I would never go there.) But instead of a great trade for a box of toys I hadn't opened in 10 years, I got a poor trade instead.
So the moral is... bartertown.com is good, just make sure not to trade big unless the guy you're trading with has a great track record.
On a related note... coming soon, home made Sternguard veterans! Stay tuned...