Buying and selling gear safely

If you are buying

Pay with PayPal Goods and Services, or pay in person once you have the gear in your hands. Those are the two methods that give you a way to get your money back. Goods and Services costs the seller a fee and some will ask you to send it as Friends and Family instead to avoid it. Pay the fee. It is the price of the protection, and it is a rounding error against what a rig costs. Friends and Family is not a payment method, it is a way of removing your own protection, so treat the request as what it is.

Ask for a photograph of the item with today's date written on a piece of paper next to it. It takes a real seller thirty seconds. Somebody who does not have the gear cannot do it at all, and no amount of talking gets round it. In the loss reported here in September 2026 the seller was asked twice for a photo of the inside of the helmet and refused twice.

A bank transfer has no built in buyer protection. If the gear never arrives, the only route back is a fraud claim with your own bank. Banks do sometimes recover the money, but it takes time and it is not guaranteed. Gift cards, cryptocurrency, Western Union and MoneyGram cannot be recovered at all, and no legitimate private seller of used skydiving gear needs to be paid any of those ways.

Read the seller context at the top of the message thread. It shows how old the account is, which verification tiers the seller holds, how many other listings they have, and how soon after signing up the listing went up. None of that is a verdict, and it is not meant to be one: it is the set of facts a cautious buyer would go and look for anyway. Each tier names exactly what it checked and nothing beyond that, and the verification tiers page sets out what each one actually proves.

Serial numbers on containers and AADs go through the stolen gear registry. That happens automatically when a listing is created, and you can search it yourself at any time on the stolen gear registry. Ask for the serial number before you pay, on anything that has one.

For anything life critical, a rigger of your choosing inspects it before money changes hands. A seller who will not allow a pre-purchase inspection has told you everything you need to know. What a rigger checks, what documentation should exist and what condition means on each type of gear is all in the used gear buying guide, which is the page to read before you start shopping rather than in the middle of a transaction.

If you are selling

Being defrauded as a seller looks nothing like being defrauded as a buyer, and it is quieter. Nobody threatens you. You get paid, and then some time later you find out that you did not.

Overpayment. A buyer sends more than the asking price, says it was a mistake, and asks you to send the difference back. The original payment reverses weeks later and you are out the difference as well as the gear. Never refund an overpayment by any route other than reversing the original transaction. If they will not accept that, the overpayment was not a mistake.

Payment confirmation screenshots and emails prove nothing. Both are trivial to fake and the emailed ones are often good. Check your own account balance, in your own banking or PayPal app, opened by you. Not a link somebody sent you, and not an image.

Do not post anything until the money has actually cleared and settled. A PayPal balance showing as pending is not cleared. A bank transfer can be recalled after it has landed. The gap between money appearing and money being yours is exactly the gap this kind of fraud lives in, so let it close before the parcel leaves.

Shipping redirects. A buyer who pays and then asks you to ship to a different address, or to send it on to a third party, is removing your seller protection, which only ever covers the address on the transaction. It does not matter how ordinary the reason sounds. If the address changes, cancel the transaction and start again with the right one on it.

Pressure is itself the signal. Pressure to move fast, to carry on the conversation somewhere off DZSpotter, or to skip a step you would normally take, is the thing to notice, however plausible the reason attached to it. An honest buyer can wait a day.

Confirming your phone number does more than add a badge. It is one of the things a cautious buyer looks for in the seller context at the top of your thread, and its absence is one of the things that makes a careful person walk away from an honest listing. It takes about a minute, and the verification tiers page sets out what it does and does not prove.

Photograph the item and the packed parcel before it goes, and always use a tracked service. A dated photo of what went into the box, and a tracking number showing where it arrived, is the whole of your evidence if a buyer later says the box was empty or never turned up.

If something has gone wrong

Report the listing. Use the Report button on the listing page. Three reports from different accounts put a listing on hold automatically, so reporting matters even when you think somebody else must have done it.

Tell your own bank straight away, and use the phrase authorised push payment fraud. If you sent a bank transfer, that phrase is what makes your bank contact the receiving bank, which is the step that can actually stop the money moving on. Do it the same day if you can.

Report it to the police. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland that is reportfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040, which replaced Action Fraud in December 2025. In Scotland, call Police Scotland on 101.

Then email info@dzspotter.com so the account can be dealt with here. Include the listing link and the dates. We cannot recover your money, and we will not pretend otherwise, but we can act on the account and we can look at whether the same person is talking to anyone else.

Common questions