left sad and upset and disheartened by pin trading.
For future trades you could always ask politely if the person would be willing to email you a pic of the front and back of the pin
Great suggestion. And if they don't send the pics, don't get the pin. It's just so easy to get caught up with pin fever - I know this first hand.
I've only bought on eBay and played "Pin It Forward" here at DPF. I got some scrappers and fakes from eBay. I have not done an actual online pin trade. I think teddy's situation is very sad.
If they won't trade back, take it to Pinpics. If they won't make it right then they shouldn't be welcome on Pinpics.
I really hate to do this but I think at this point you need to take this situation as a lesson learned and move forward. PinPics specifically tells you to be careful trading online and it is at your own risk. While I think that this is totally crappy for you I'm afraid that the only recourse you have is to leave bad trader reference on PP and to post their PP ID here. Unfortunately I have witnessed what can happen when you confront the scrapper-trader on this, and here's how it will go.....
they will simply say that you switched the pins after you got them. Sounds crappy but it's reality. One thing that I do to combat this is I will not trade (online) for any pin that has a scrapper/unauthorized alert on PP. This way at least you have a fighting chance that its "real"