After looking at the bey itself, I put a lot of focus on the seller to determine if it's a safe buy.
I do a search here on the forum for any seller names I don't already recognize. I think it's easiest to do this with a search engine like Google. Just tell it to search only this site for the name (and make sure you spell it all right).
Like in your case, you'd search with:
Quote:site:worldbeyblade.org skyliners2012
And you'd see links to thread pages where skyliners2012 is talked about. I try to read multiple ones, the most recent if I can, to get a good feel on what members think.
I think this is the best way to do it, because then you can see what happened to other people here on WBO, and multiple people reporting the same thing is good.
As for spotting it on your own, I think the thing to keep in mind is that there are clear scammers and then there are just buyers that don't rack up enough trustworthy points (so you'd have to weigh taking a risk to find out). So besides looking at the beys themselves for the TT logo and whatnot, here's what I keep in mind (thanks to talking with different people here):
- Does the price seem too good to be true? Then it probably is.
- How many ratings does the person have from selling? (Buying and selling get combined to make the number.) You can't tell if someone is trustworthy if they don't have many selling ratings.
- How many positive ratings? What do the Beyblade-purchasing buyers say?
- What do the negative ratings in the past year say? Do any claim the seller sold fake things? Or that the seller lied? And how does the seller respond to these claims? (Ignore people who buy something like a random booster and complain because they didn't understand how those work.)
- How many different people have done the ratings? It's normal for batch-buyers to leave multiple reviews of the same, but if most reviews are the same person, be suspicious.
- What do they sell? If they specialize in Beyblades or toys or hobby collecting rather than every kind of item under the sun, that's a good sign. (Some good sellers can manage a variety of goods, but yeah.)
But really, I try to focus on who has been declared trustworthy here as much as I can.
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