I am trying to think of all the ways I can be royally screwed by doing this, and have come up with these 3 basic ways. Now I'm seeking advice on how likely each one of these risks is to occur. And how good these methods for avoiding them are.
1) Vendor scam. This is actually the least risky (because all you lose is money, see below for worse) but perhaps the most likely. Basically, order something and it never arrives and vendor splits town with your cash. Ways to mitigate? Don't FE. Except that eliminates 50% of available vendors. Even if you do FE there are still ways vendors can scam, eg. wait for autofinalize, ship to a bad address, etc. In any case, if I get scammed like this, I'll chalk it up to experience and basically just try to find a good vendor based on all the tools out there (feedback, forums).
2) LE scam. Your vendor could be LE or package could get intercepted in transit and then CD. Then angry men with guns handcuff you and take you away. With a clean record, I would probably eventually be ok, but it would cost a shitload and would probably lose my job. This sucks. I would rather get vendor scammed 20 times over than get busted. How can you feel safe that when you send your address over PGP the other guy on the receiving end of that email isn't really the feds?
3) Ok, I saved the best for last: let's say you get a package open it up and it has exactly what you ordered! Hooray, you're thinking, vendor didn't scam you and LE nowhere in sight. But then you take said materials and they turn out to be fake or poison or whatever and you end up in a coma or just fucking dead. Clearly the risk of this is lower than the above 2, but the consequences are pretty epically severe, so it is worth taking all available precautions to verify that your stash is legit. How can you really do that?
True, this is a risk and it does happen but I think the frequency of this issue is over played on this Subreddit (lots of "It's been 16 hours and my package hasn't arrived! XXX must be a scammer, a LEO, and zombie Kim Il-Sung reincarnated" posts around here).
Ah, while this threat certainly is possible, if you research a vendor's ratings as well as their status in the community, you can get a pretty good idea what kind of person they are and whether others have had success in ordering.
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