It's sad, but there's not a whole lot you can do if the money order has been cashed. This is out and out stealing, but when you go to the post office to report mail fraud, they brush you off and are very unhelpful about any advice whatsoever (at least here in CA where I live). When you buy the money order from the USPS, they will tell you that they will prosecute people that abuse the system, but when you try to get them to follow up, it's useless.
My bad experience was with E-bay, and not with audiogon, and hopefully these slimeballs that do this kind of stuff will never find audiogon because it's so specialized to real audiophiles. My senario was a little different, but you'll have to try to go through the same processes to recover your money. My senerio was when I bought a DVD player that was advertised as "Brand new" on ebay, but when I received it, it was battered and obviously used. I went to the post office thinking that this was a blatant case of fraud and would be handled by the post office since my USPS money order was sent via USPS (with tracking), and the unit was sent by USPS as well. I figured it would be pretty simple to file a mail fraud claim, but when I got to the post office to talk to someone, I got the run-around. They basically told me that I needed to contact e-bay and there wasn't anything they could do about it. Maybe the fraud division of the USPS only deals with bigtime crooks and they just don't care about the nickel and dime stuff. Of course, ebay was very helpful and helped me take care of this matter, NOT! They made me try to get an audio video shop to justify that the unit was used. Of course, no shop wanted to get involved in any way, shape, or form. E-bay admitted that the unit was used, but still refused to give me any money because they claim that the description was not different from the actual item. So needless to say, I will never buy or sell anything on ebay again. I hope more people realize how bad ebay is and they basically just take your money, but offer no insurance or assurance against fraud whatsoever. Hopefully, there will be other places like Audiogon popping up and eventually, take a big enough share of the marketplace to force ebay to have some sort of integrity!
Good luck to you. Hopefully it's just hung up in the mail like the others suggested.
