I have noticed a significant increase in the last 30 days in scammers on various free online gun classified sites, though there have always been a lot of them for years now. Here are the giveaways I have noticed. There might be more I have missed.


  1. New Account - their account creation date is usually the day the ad was placed, or not many days in the past.
  2. Often no city listed. A common theme is giving the state name for the city and the state such as Texas, Texas, or Arizona, Arizona. If they won't give the city they are in, the odds are pretty high they are a scammer, but that isn't always the case.
  3. Usually they say "Text Only" and often won't answer their phone if you call them.
  4. Sometimes there is strange wording, but not too often since they are stealing other people's descriptions
  5. Lower price than the going rate
  6. References to "bidding" or other auction site verbiage on non auction classified sites.
  7. Highly desirable items that are rarely seen listed, though the price might be in line with market value.
  8. References to shipping in local ad venues where 99.99% of transactions are done face to face.
  9. And lastly, using images and text from someone else's listing on Gunbroker or some other gun venue.


Now for the rest of the story....

#9 was how I discovered that Google was playing anti gun games with reverse photo searches of firearms photographs. Knowing that the scammers don't have the actual gun on hand to take photos of, they obviously have to steal photos from somewhere to use in their ads. Often they get them from Gunbroker but sometimes less known sources. About half of the scammer ads have photos that were taken from Gunbroker auctions. So, the first thing I do when I see an ad that looks too good to be true, or of a harder to find gun, is to check for duplicate images using Google Images reverse search. Their photos will show up on someone else's open or closed auction or listing in an entirely different state than the one the scammer claims to be in.

Every time over the last few weeks when I did a google reverse search of a photo of a gun where duplicate images are not found, the top two results were links to Non Lethal Weapons pages. Today, however I got two links dealing with the word "solid", followed by "visually similar images". It is almost like they got caught and stopped with what I took as anti gun self defense links and switched to something totally unrelated to the photo searched. If you haven't used Google Images, try it to help spot scammers. Also check and see if you get the same results that I did today with the bogus related search suggestion.

https://images.google.com/

Click on the Camera icon and enter the URL of the photo in the ad.

This is what I got with a dozen searches today:
No other sizes of this image found.
Possible related search: solid