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To succeed in the used Whaler game, you need to have a full understanding of value, have money pretty much in hand and be ready to move fast. I bought my 15 after over a year of looking around - it was posted on a Whaler site and I called the owner within 15 minutes of the ad being posted. Within 15 minutes of that, he had sent new pictures of specific areas of the boat I wanted to look at, and 15 minutes after that, the check was in the mail.

In your scam experience, there were a number of red flags - the slow and squirrelly responses, the warehouse (what private seller does that?), the BS about needing direct mail as CL was going to spam. The scammers are often much better than that - glad you didn't get taken!