Museum of Liverpool

“Cats have a scam going - you buy the food, they eat the food, they go away; that's the deal.”
Eddie Izzard
“My wife thinks I’m mad coming all this way for what could be a scam”. “My wife thinks I’m mad coming all this way for what could be a no-show”. Famous last words I exchanged with someone with whom I’d arranged the sale of my twenty-year-old medium format film scanner. On the strength of little more than an exchange of emails I’d travelled nearly 200 miles to meet a complete stranger who was coming to Liverpool to collect it (from a complete stranger) – the scanners are real workhorses with a brilliant reputation but notoriously prone to damage in transit by courier and insurance just won’t cover it, so most buyers collect them in person. Sitting in the hotel room after an overnight my phone pinged, a message saying he’d arrived and was waiting for me. All very Harry Palmer (or Smiley) as we went to the multi-storey car park for him to inspect the goods, before handing over a white envelope (yes, it should have been brown) stuffed with cash – we didn’t trust each other THAT much! Deal completed, we went our separate ways; he with a great new toy to play with and me with more than enough cash to afford an Epson film scanner to fill the void and a Beatles tour of Liverpool before heading home. With all the (well deserved) warnings about scams and being wary of online communication it seems that, with some sensible precautionary measures (on both sides), there is still scope for a bit of trust and honest dealing to be done.