WHY OLX.IN IS NOT SAFE AS COMPAE TO EBAY.IN

Recently there has been a surge in the free classified sites in India where in they have been promoted very high through TVC’s. A simple mantra which says sell everything for free without paying any fees or commissions by just uploading the photos from your smart phone and listing it. Expect a lot of feedback from users and convert the sale. This sounds good but you need to make sure that you don’t end up meeting scammers on these sites. Free classified sites like olx.in & quickr.com are easy to use, the listing part is also very easy and you start getting a lot of offers, but the sad part is that 95% of those interested would call you up and ask for a better deal or a discount first. Next they would be interested in meeting, looking into the product and then decide if they would like to pay or not.
In case of ebay.in the company itself guarantees both the parties and the seller gets his payment only when the buyer confirms the receipt of the product as it was mentioned in the listing. This is most of the times very important because it safeguards not only your money but also your time and also ensures that you don’t have to keep meeting the other party regularly. The discounts / better deals is out of question mostly because on ebay you generally post your best price in the listing and if it suits the buyer they proceed with the purchase, apart from which they also get generally around 5-7% of additional discounts from ebay itself.
Here is a story of my cousin who had sold his phone through a listing on olx.in and got scammed from a person called “Harshavardhan Reddy Pidathala”

He had listed his sale on olx.in for free following which he had received many calls from different prospective buyers. Out of these the above mentioned person ie “Harshavardhan Reddy” informed him on phone that he is going to purchase the Phone and would like to meet. My cousin met him at their planned meeting point where in the buyer came in Fortuner Car, which gave a remark that this guy is mostly not going to scam. The deal was for cash payment but after verifying the product, he said he didn’t get the cash as he didn’t get the salary and would like to pay by check, which my cousin accepted. [Sadly he is new to all this didn't expect what happened next.]
Following this the next day he deposited the check in the bank and later the payment was cleared and transferred to his bank account, but by the end of the day his payment was reverted back and was debited back from his account with the following message.


Next the phone buyer would daily call up on phone and check for the bank account because he would mention that he would transfer it through Wire Transfer / NEFT. The sad thing is that never happened and he had mentioned that he had graduated from Sheffield Hallam University and is not a scammer but never made the payment for the purchase. He had even insisted that his friends would pay the money through cash because he had to visit Bangalore for some work and also mentioned that his salary was not credited. He works with Lebara Mobile where according to him he has a part time job and he mentioned that the salary is not paid to them on time by the company.

Bounced Bank Check Copy

All the above statements were a mere excuse by the person who claimed to have graduated from a creditable university and it looks like a joke because these days people think its easy to scam people and sometimes these kind of classified sites help them. What are your thoughts about this whole issue and what are your suggestions to my cousin in this issue?