100% scam.

There is no buyer.

Notice how the scammer doesn't call what you are selling by name? He uses the generic word "item", that is because he sends the same stock copy/paste email to anyone selling everything that he can find and he has no idea what you are selling and doesn't care.

There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money.

He is not interested in your identity or bank account, only your cash.

The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the "secretary/assistant/accountant" and will demand you cash a large fake check sent on a stolen UPS/FedEx billing account number and send the money via Western Union or moneygram back to the scammer posing as the "shipping company". When your bank realizes the check is fake and it bounces, you get the real life job of paying back the bank for the bounced check fees and all the bank's money you sent to an overseas criminal.

Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.

When you refuse to send him your cash he will send increasingly nasty and rude emails trying to convince you to go through with his scam. The scammer could also create another fake name and email address like "FBI@ gmail.com", "police_person @hotmail.com" or "investigator @yahoo.com" and send emails telling you the job is legit and you must cash the fake check and send your money to the scammer or you will face legal action. Just ignore, delete and block those email addresses. Although, reading a scammer's attempt at impersonating a law enforcement officer can be extremely funny.

Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of being the perfect buyer, great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.

Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.

Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.

If you google "fake check buyer scam", "fake Western Union buyer fraud" or something similar and you will find hundreds of posts of victims and near victims of this type of scam.

Never deal with anything other than cash or PayPal.

The "I'm a very busy person (Marine)" line has been used in other scams, so...yes this is most likely a scam.

Checks in general are a bad idea because it's very easy to create a fake check that will pass scrutiny long enough to actually get deposited into your account - then when the check is discovered to be bad, the money is withdrawn along with the bank's "bad check" fee which is usually $35-50.

The banks could make changes to make it a lot harder for people to issue fake checks, but then, that would mean the banks wouldn't be able to suck those bad check + overdraft fees out of victims' accounts.

Take Craiglist's advice and only deal with locals face to face.

All of those printed money forms can be faked, no doubt some of those are offering to overpay, asking for a portion of the money back in some form, like you forwarding $50 to a shipping company, these are Nigerian 409 scams relying on flaws in the banking system Sweating mentioned, they may only be after that excess in case. Stolen paypal accounts are used as well.

There was actually a Nigerian pop song celebrating the con "I go chop your dollar"