Unfortunately, this is the reality of the Internet Age.
When you use Craigslist or Freecycle even, you are opening yourself up to flakes at the very least, scams at the very worst. I am kind of glad that someone thought of this. I checked the list but it is very sparse so far, so the idea still needs some time to spread. Eventually there is probably a better way but since most of Freecycle is on Yahoo Groups instead of its own platform, it would be hard to incorporate a more useful solution.