This may help, encouragement wise..
back in 2002 I bought a Mac laptop via an online auction site and wired the seller the money for it, approximately $500. The seller's name was Morgan Engle.
He never sent me the laptop. He sold this same laptop to several others, and word quickly spread on the internet that he was a scam artist. He was scamming both buyers of Mac laptops and musical instruments, specifically drum parts.
He was quite arrogant about it and used his real name, address and real bank account to perform this fraud.
Long story short, me and several others got together and files complaints with the police department and the FTC. Apparently enough of us complained about him to the FTC that they investigated him.
They made an example of him in their "Operation Bidder Beware" in 2003, where he was banned from ever participating in online sales again and ordered to pay restitution to the people he stole money from. It was estimated he had made off with tens of thousands of dollars, upwards of $100,000 total.
Here is the FTC website on the subject, you can see Morgan Engle's name referenced in the bottom as a file:
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/04/bidderbeware.shtm
And here is the FTC file on him:
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/04/morganenglecmp.pdf
Randomly in 2004 I checked my mailbox and low and behold I had a US Postal Money Order from Morgan Engle in the amount of $500 with a post it note that said "Sorry." I later learned that several others also received much of their money back.
Anyway, hopefully this can be encouraging... if enough of you band together, something good can come out of this. I realize we are talking about a scammer from Romania, so the FTC doesn't really have jurisdiction there... but who knows?
