OT: Ebay Scams on Masks
David Weaver
I have to spray a few things in the next several weeks and sadly, i'm at the end of my stash of O/V cartridges and my half face respirator is getting a little stiffer to breathe through.
I looked it up, and it's an older AO safety type and I"m a dozen years behind ever using it again - I guess it gets thrown away as cartridges aren't allowed to be compatible from one face unit brand to another and something to do with HD and 3M eliminated the AO safety brand from the market. A once-purchasable $26 half face respirator with P100 and charcoal filters is now more like $50-$60.
But it took me a while just to find something that wasn't full chernobyl in features that I'd wear at home.
And I noticed something in the meantime (other than the large number of chinese brands that look like copies of the 3M design) - several of the listings of 3M respirators on ebay with more reasonable prices appear to be fake listings. Not fake masks, but entirely fake listings, and they're making a killing. One lists a respirator with cartridges (3M) and claims to be in California. $20 with shipping (that's a little bit less believable than just reasonable). I assumed it was counterfeit at first. But closer look shows that the lister sold 412 units so far in the last couple of weeks with not a single feedback received on any (neither in the listing itself nor for the seller ID, which was set up in December - perhaps to sit on and use at a later date).
There were a couple of others in "New Jersey, US" or some obscure name in California that had a few hundred, also.
If you're really hard up (more than me), you can eventually find something like just the face apparatus with no cartridges for $80 - used - those are real. Real jerks!! 
CPO ended up adding a listing for respirators somewhere along the line and I finally managed to get a real 3m half face with cartridges for $49. Almost double the AO safety mask that has served me well in the relatively few times that I've had to use it.