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 sended him the money and right after that he sended 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 sended it, 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 sended 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.
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July 6th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
I usually never do business in an impulse. Its always thinking that makes me buying sites, even though it makes me loose some good sites, I will have to be happy about not being scammed.
July 6th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I should think more to, but I am not buying that much sites anymore.. I want to get some quality sites and make them big!
July 6th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Hi,
This is really helpful.
Cheers!
Ray
July 6th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
I agree that it’s always key to check into the past of any seller you are about to engage with. I wish there was some sort of universal feedback ratings that went with people no matter where they were selling something at, so that if they ripped off a bunch of people elsewhere, I’d know about it
And kudos to the guy who paid back the extra $10 he didn’t earn. I wish there were more people like him out there!
July 6th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Hehe !! Yes that would be a good system
July 6th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
ah sorry you got scammed
July 7th, 2007 at 12:22 am
Thats horrible… scammers suck! lol, I’ll be more careful from now on.
July 7th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Thats sucks mate. It could have been a lot worse. I hope I am one of your trsted associates..lol. I think you one of mine…
No but I hate being riped of and hate when I see it happen to good people.
July 7th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Thanks Stratz, ofcourse your one of my trusted associates
I know, I wanted it to quick. Need to do a research first hehe
July 7th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
[...] nomar - Can you trust people online? Nomar writes a very interesting post about trusting people online. He links it to his personal [...]
July 10th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Great informative post.