You can! But sometimes you get scammed to. You have to be very careful picking out the people to trust. I will give an example of both sites I experienced.
I will start with the scammer:
It was on Digital Point (No offense for DP users, lot of good ones to) and I was looking to buy a website with pagerank. I got in touch with one of the members and we PM’ed three or four times before we got to action. He added me on MSN so we could talk and discuss things a lot easier. It sounded good so we started the transfer.
I sent him the money and right after that he sent me the domain name and website files to my email. Everything went fine till now. I opened the files in my email and was going to install the site on my hosting. When it was completed the only thing I had to do was import the database. He also sent, so it was not suspicious. I logged into my admin and tried to import it. But it was a wrong database. Not from the site I bought.
So I checked on msn and wanted to let him know of the error. And… he was offline, never saw him back online either. I checked his DP account, and I had to checked it earlier, because it was a new member with no iTrading. I ended up with only the domain and lost around $ 100. Lucky for me this was not a big purchase.
Lesson learned: Always check the members on forums if you do business with them. Check their previous posts and iTrader ratings if they have any.
Example of trustful people:
I hired a guy to write some articles for me. I gave him $ 5 for 1 article (long one) and he would make a total of 5 articles for me. After two articles he asked for a early payment of these to, so I gave him $ 10 in front, no problem. After he finished the other 3 to a week later, he mailed me saying the job was done and give me the articles. Than I paid him $ 25 instead of $ 15 that he earned. I forgot about the early payment of the first two.
He mailed me back and freshed up my mind about this, and he sent back the money. 😎
What I am trying to say is: First check the people you are doing business with. Check their previous posts at forums and ratings if they have any. Check out their websites and make the decision if you can trust them.