possible scam or was I out of line?

[philly98459]

Hi. Need advice from the community.

I joined recently and have been looking to buy my first rolex. Recently, a long time member posted a watch for sale at a crazy good price (like, ~$2k under what others were asking for a similar watch).

I've seen good prices a few times but I usually stay away because the seller has little history on this site. This member, though, has posted for years, although not as often in recent months. Looking through their posting history, it was clear they had a great watch and car collection (watches worth multiples of the one I was trying to buy) and I thought, maybe they just want to sell this watch quickly and don't care if they're $1-2k under market. They had bought a few watches on the forum but I couldn't find evidence of them selling any.

And this is what happened next. All communication was through private messages here, although I did offer up my phone and email address.

-- Reached out to see if watch was still available. It was.

-- Said I'd like to buy the watch at asking price but needed a few days to move the money into the right account for wire. No problem, they said, get back to me when you're ready.

-- I read about a thread about long time accounts being hacked by scammers offering really good deals and got a little nervous that I wasn't dealing with the actual account holder.

-- 3-4 days later, after moving the money, PM'd seller and said money was ready and, although it was clear they had a solid reputation on the forum, would they be willing to text me a picture of their drivers license to verify I was talking to the actual account holder and that their account had not been hacked.

-- Have not heard back for 1.5 days. I am assuming the deal is dead.


So my question is: was I out of line asking for a copy of the license or was that okay, just trying to mitigate the risk of being scammed from a hacked account?


Because now, either the seller is a) too busy to respond, b) thinks I'm scamming them for their ID and is not responding, or c) not the actual account owner. I don't want to share this person's username yet because this still might be a big misunderstanding. I'll add here that at this point, I know nothing about this person other than their username, their home city from their bio (confirmed by the content of some posts), and a few other things from their posting history like watches and cars, but no full name, email, phone, etc.

If anyone can offer some advice, I'd appreciate it. Like I said, I'm pretty new here. I thought I had read some threads where buyers asked for ID before wiring money. But perhaps that's not normal and I pissed off a legit seller.