Hello everybody,
I don't think anyone can say what his neighbour should or shouldn't buy. If people want to buy a patchwork or a rework or a copy or whatever else, I think it's fundamentally their business.
However, I don't think it's OK when someone sells an item as something which it isn't. To me this amounts to a fraud and should not be tolerated even though frauds are not so unusual among collecting items (not just guns). My wild guess is that many of us have bought at least one item and found out later they'd been misled by the seller (keeping essential information silent or even telling lies). Many consider this as being part of the collector's learning process. Even though this may unfortunately be true, I don't think it makes it any less unacceptable as it still amounts to a fraud!
The good thing with this forum is that people with different backgrounds and experiences on lugers meet and confront and share their views which makes it very interesting for the experienced luger friends as well as for the beginners who find a convenient way to get to information (at least I did). Because of the overall high quality of the information found in this forum (OK you may find some nonsense here and there but it never gets through without being criticised :-) ), it could give the less experienced luger friends some kind of (maybe unfounded) confidence as to the seriousness of the ads. I've though not heard that fraudulent ads have gone through this forum.
The way a forum should be run is basically the owner's business as mentioned above. I nevertheless think it would be a shame to allow a high quality forum like the LF shelter fraudulent ads and use the LF reputation for that purpose.
Now how do you tell an ad is not serious? Practically, it seems very difficult to filter them out.
Then again, a fraudulent ad is only as effective as it finds a victim. Why should we let the LF members become victims? Instead of trying to work on individual ads, it may be worth to provide specific general information on this very issue and open a new section on the LF in which members can talk about bad experiences so that each one of us doesn't have to make the same mistakes with the same crooks or be fooled by the same tricks. In other words: shift from the learning by trial and error to the learning from errors made by others.
Just my opinion.
What do you think John?
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