I have won on amazon as a seller by videoing the boxing of the original (playstation3) and unboxing the "return" (a broken VHS recorder).

Its simple just to pull out your phone and grab a few seconds of sealing the box and putting on the label. Keep it for a few weeks until the transaction "settles" then delete.

Fufilled by Amazon is much safer and more reliable. I wouldn't spend money I would miss on an item from 3rd party sellers who handle their own shipping on Amazon.

FBA takes a huge chunk out of the sale's proceeds. It easily converts what would otherwise be high-margin items into losers. That's not really a scenario that your average person trying to sell a used phone would expect. The seller is also responsible for collecting (done by Amazon) and remitting sales tax (NOT done by Amazon, afaik) on FBA transactions.

The best option is to go local as a parent commenter already said. Ask the person to unbox and demo the item before you pay. If the product doesn't clearly work, leave without paying.

Yard sale groups on Facebook, Craigslist, and an active region-specific classifieds site if there's one in your area are good places to make such arrangements.

Don't meet at either party's home. The police station parking lot is best. Some police stations even have parking spots reserved for people who are performing transactions arranged online.

Safer for who? We are talking about scam buyers here not scam sellers.

Amazon handled my claim when I was scammed by a third party Amazon seller.

From what I've heard from others Amazon is worse than ebay in terms of scam buyers. I can't talk from experience because I've never been personally scammed on either platform and I've sold a lot of expensive stuff on both: MacBooks, laptops, iPads, etc. EDIT: Now that I think about it, that's not entirely true. I was "scammed" on eBay by someone who claimed their PayPal and eBay accounts were hacked. I only send to PayPal confirmed addresses so PayPal's seller protection took care of me for that because the address was confirmed by PayPal.

However, I've gotten a LOT of scam Amazon messages. They are all the same "plz send me pictures at [poorly obfuscated email address]." I'd get 3-4 a day for a used Macbook. The scam is they get your email address by getting them to email them and then they send you a fake "shipped send now" email. Some people even go as far as just sending "shipped send now" as an Amazon message! I've reported all these and Amazon doesn't do anything about them. All they did was ding my seller account for marking too many messages as "no response required."