This incident should be taken as a further warning to all to exercise extreme caution when dealing with persons they do not assuredly know at a distance.
As a practical matter we do not have any sort of vetting process for new applicants, that is we do not require nominations or sponsors for membership and essentially only require a working email address for return of login credentials.
The join date is displayed right below the profile picture for a member's posts. If a member is not included on the
member list, then they will either be in moderated status or banned. Extra caution needs to be applied before sending money or items to persons not well established in our forums community.
If one does choose to engage in a transaction with another member, then it is wise to use a payment intermediary that provides you maximum recourse and chances of recovery if you are being scammed.
We have allowed new members limited access to the PM functions so that they may directly contact other members to ask questions that might not be appropriate for the open forums or to contact a member offering an item in swap. There is debate among members of the Moderator Team about this policy, but for the present time we have chosen an information campaign as opposed to punishing all new members for the actions of one. Essentially, this is the first notice that we received of such a scam here and the offending new member was immediately banned pending investigation.