I would consider myself a crypto enthusiast, someone who thinks he is way ahead of the pack even tho I only properly started paying attention to crypto early this year. I'm quite careful with my keys and passwords.
I started with mining, at the time I managed to get myself some GPU's at retail price before the big boom but now as I am at about 50% ROI and the prices are really good I decided I need to start cashing out a small portion of my earnings.
I could have just cashed out on kraken or coinbase but then I thought okay let's check out ebay. I thought what is the hardest thing about crypto = the first purchase, so I wanted to combine that with the power of PayPal and ebay - the global market, with the recent media coverage I thought surely there would be many Joes interested in it!
And boy was I right! Within hours of listing 0.01 ethereum for 10$ which really is about 8.80$ after fees still almost 200% I had all 50 of my listings sold. I couldn't believe it, I thought I had found the Golden goose.
So there I was after selling 0.5 ethereum for 1000$ going through all the emails sending people their coins and just as I was nearly done I get a refund request, I thought to myself eh maybe the price dipped and he changed his mind at this stage I had not sent this person any ethereum and issued a refund, next another refund request, I decided to ask this time why they wanted a refund and that's when my heart stopped, the buyer claimed someone had HACKED their account and made the purchase.
I immediately refunded the person but at this stage I had sent 0.4 ETH to the other buyers, then it was a waiting game, all day I was getting email after email that the buyers accounts were all hacked. And logged into my PayPal to find all my fund being held by PayPal and all my ETH gone.
I have contacted the buyers, ebay and PayPal, and waiting to see what the procedure for these cases is.
So the moral of the story is, stay decentralized! And don't trust the middle man :) 