A seller on Reddit said he listed a high-end collectible pistol on GunBroker for about $4,700 and almost immediately found himself in a deal that felt off. In his post, he explained that he was not a dealer, had zero ratings on the site, and only made the account to sell that one gun. He said the buyer texted him right after purchasing it, which at first seemed normal enough, especially because he understood why someone might be cautious about buying an expensive firearm from a first-time seller.
Then the requests started piling up. According to the post, the buyer was a registered FFL and had already uploaded the necessary documents through the sale, but still wanted extra proof that the seller was legit. The seller said he sent a picture of his license and passport with some numbers covered up and even offered to FaceTime when he got home from the airport. Instead of moving the sale forward, though, the buyer went quiet. The seller wrote that after three unanswered texts, he finally sent a firm message saying that if he did not hear back by Thursday, he would move on to another buyer under GunBroker’s five-day policy.
That was when the whole thing really started to feel wrong to him. He said the buyer came back with a bitter response, accused him of making threats, and warned that it would be a “serious issue” if he sold the gun to someone else because the buyer had already purchased it. At the same time, the buyer claimed a bank check had already been mailed earlier in the week and asked for yet another photo, this time a picture of the seller’s ID with the firearm in the same frame. The seller said that request was where he started digging in his heels. He offered again to FaceTime and said he was happy to take more photos of the firearm itself, but he did not want to send the ID-and-gun combo shot.
In the post, he said the buyer kept insisting the check was on the way and would take about five days to arrive, while still pressing for the extra photo. The seller wrote that he had already looked up the risks of sending an image like that and knew some people thought the danger was overstated, but he could not shake the feeling that the request was excessive. What made him even more suspicious was something he noticed while checking other listings: a similar firearm was also up for auction, and the same buyer appeared to be the high bidder there too at a price about $1,000 lower than his own. That led him to wonder if the buyer had “purchased” his gun mainly to stall the sale while trying to work a better deal elsewhere.
The replies were not subtle. One commenter with more than 100 GunBroker deals under his belt told him flat-out to end the deal, report the buyer as non-paying, and relist the pistol, saying that if the buyer had not provided proof of payment, then he had not really paid. Others said the whole thing sounded like a check scam, especially with the threats, the long delay, and the constant demands for more identity documents. Several people warned him not to ship anything and not to treat a deposited check as real money until the bank confirmed it had fully cleared, since fake cashier’s checks and official-looking bank checks are a common way scammers buy time.
A few commenters did point out that an FFL receiving a gun from a private seller may need identifying information for their records, but even there, people drew a line. One user said a dealer might need some form of identification number for the books, but not necessarily a driver’s license number, while another said he never shares ID numbers online after having his identity stolen before. Another commenter said asking for a simple verification photo with usernames and a date was one thing, but asking for more and more documents while supposedly waiting on an untracked check was another. The seller himself replied that this was exactly what bothered him most: in his words, what kind of buyer mails a check and then keeps asking for more ID and firearm photos afterward.
So the thread turned into a pretty familiar kind of warning story, just from the seller’s side instead of the buyer’s. The seller went into the transaction knowing people might question whether he was real because he was new to the platform. What he did not expect was to feel like the person on the other side was trying to collect more and more personal information without ever doing the one thing that would actually move the sale along cleanly: prove the money was real. By the end of the post, he was not asking how to make the buyer comfortable anymore. He was asking whether the whole thing looked like a scam. Most of the replies made it pretty clear what they thought.
