Oh didn't know CL FORCED you to not ship, that's weird, why can't the seller and buyer do whatever the hell they want... if both parties agree to ship, that's none of CL's business ?!
Anyway, didn't know about that...
Crossing my human fingers and toes for you, hoping you can keep the scope and get a refund, that would be super cool, a bunch of parts delivered to your door step for free ! ...to help you fix or/and maintain the next one you will buy, of course !
Woops, no they don't force anything. They don't facilitate anything either, like shipping, payment or provide any dispute resolution services.
As a result, their standard advice is to always do business in person, as that is your best means to avoid fraud.
That's why I assumed your similar site followed similar practices, unless you're silly enough to just PayPal money to some rando on the intardnet and hope you get your stuff. At least over here, that'd be just throwing money away.
mnem
Ah... uh, yes, here we are silly and just send money to the guy hoping to receive anything at all, that's how it works, the seller is assumed to be incompetent and greedy, but at least honest enough to at least send you the junk you paid him for.
Works the same for anything really. Whenever you buy something on-line from a professional vendor... if they don't send you your stuff, what are you gonna do ? Pay 5000 bucks a lawyer and spend 3 years in court hoping to get your 10 or 100 bucks back ? No, of course. So in practice you just have to trust that the seller private or pro, will indeed send you the stuff you paid him for...
That said, our site, leboncoin.fr, has been taken over by a bank from I can't remember what foreign country. A Northern country I think. IIRC Leboncoin is not French, it was first created in a Northern country. Sweden/Norway/Finland can't remember. So now that site is trying every trick they can think of, to steal some of your money.
One of their ideas is to serve as an intermediary for the transaction (as I explained to you in a recent MP) : the seller can, if he wants, offer the buyer to handle the transaction via the site. In this case the buyer sends the money to the site not the seller. The site then charges you a few Euros, saying it's for your SECURITY (magical trendy FUD word...). Then it gives the seller a couple days only to send the item. Then 4 days later it asks the buyer "have you received the item, or do you have a problem with it ? ". If you don't reply to that, the buyer will automatically receive his money. However if you say " Hell yeah there is a problem !!! " then you just have to cross fingers that the site will be honest and motivated enough to actually do something about it.... good luck.
But it happened to me once. I had bought a glowing Tek scope on that site, and with the seller we decided to let the site handle the transaction. Glad I did, because the seller never sent the scope !
So after a few days, seeing as the scope was not even posted at all, I told the site about it, saying well you have access to the tracking system of the shipment (because they partner with the shipping company), so you can see for yourself he never handed the item to the shipping company ! So... luckily the website refunded me my 50 Euros for the scope and shipping and their own fee as well !
Other trick they use : when you use their messaging system to chat with the seller, they have a robot that scans your messages and censors e-mail addresses and phone numbers "FOR YOUR SECURITY" they say... when in fact it's just to make it as difficult for you as possible, to handle the transaction on your own, and force you to use the site instead. This way they get to charge the buyer a few Euros.
So what I do is send my e-mail address as a JPG image, because their chat system allows to send pictures. So far their robot does not "OCR" attached pictures, but for how long I don't know !