Verified answer

It's a scam, they will rip you off!

Online shopping is convenient and can save you money, but it's not quite the same as shopping in the high street. At its best, you can purchase items from trusted, well-established retailers - although, of course, you can't actually inspect the goods. But at its worst, shopping on the web can be more like using your credit card at a car boot sale to buy goods in unmarked sealed cardboard boxes. Anyone can create a web page, so there's no immediate way for a shopper to tell whether an online shop is genuine at first sight. So there's more to being safe than just ensuring your card transaction is encrypted. Firstly, ask yourself whether the offer is realistic. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Quite a lot of stolen and sub-standard goods get offered at seemingly huge discounts by small traders on auction and free advertisement sites. Online 'sales' of non-existent event tickets are notorious. But even mainstream dealers frequently limit your ability to check what you're buying - photos of goods with captions like "the item supplied may not be identical to that illustrated" are all too common. It's a sad fact that many perfectly honest online business owners simply don't understand their legal obligations. But that makes it difficult to distinguish between them and less legitimate traders. You should probably err on the side of caution.