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Yep this is a common scam, they do the same thing for things like laptops and other high dollar items.
I have a simple rule - I do not even think of doing business for big items outside Canada or the US, it might cost me a sale or a purchase of an item I want (to buy or sell) but I've yet to be scammed online and I'd like to keep it that way!
Another common one is for example "oh you want $8000 for that car? My client can send you $10000 and you send him $1000 back via Western Union and keep $1000 for shipping/handling/whatever" basically they're turning a worthless piece of paper into $1000.
Another is the fake escrow companies. I was looking around for a good used or new Apple laptop, found one for a REALLY good price (too good but I figured why not humor the guy) on Amazon's marketplace. He emailed me back saying to make it safe yada yada escrow service. The domain in question? Was 4 days old, yeah a legit escrow service that is 4 days old? The site looked halfway legit with Verisign this and Secure that everywhere, but when you loaded the secure page it was secured by an Instant-SSL certificate (free) and not a Verisign cert at all (among other crap that was so obvious). I humored him, emailed his provider and got the web site pulled for the fake escrow site.
3 weeks later he apparently was up and running again and blanket emailed everyone who contacted him earlier and I got another reply, word for word the same as the first, and the fake escrow site was back online with a new web host. I figured screw it, blocked him from emailing me and didn't even bother reporting the scammer a second time, they just move around to a new host and keep trucking.
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