There's a few things I think you should say to people when selling accounts. These are all designed to turn away people looking to just do what they did to mine - strip it, delete the chars and pass the gold to their own chars via the auction house, and then cancel payment without being traceable.
- say the account is not active. a scammer will not register an account with their credit card. they want active accounts. everyone knows you can't steal a wow account for the long term, so the only people that will try stealing are going to just vendor all your shit and delete your chars.
- say it's not linked to battle.net account. it's easier to hijack this way, because they just change the email login and then you have no way to keep tabs on the account, or characters.
- make sure their paypal is confirmed. (the person that tried scamming me was using an unconfirmed one)
- try to communicate over email, or something. i've found that AIM is useless because you can't tie their AIM account to their email, usually. unless they tell you their AIM in the email, i guess. I wish I had communicated primarily over email because then I'd have more official logs, and could have checked to make sure their email kind of matches their paypal email if it's not the same.
these might reduce the initial value of your character, some, and make it hard to find offers, but if you think youve got a serious buyer then you can tell them the truth about things.
just basically, try to have some sort of a link between the various parts of the transaction - initial communication, paypal email, the email they used when contacting you, their AIM name, whatever.
i've sold characters/accounts 4 times. 3 of them went flawlessly, and this last one he tried stealing from me. all of the times that it went well, the people i spoke too were more genuin, and were not quick to do the transaction. the fourth person who tried scamming was very quick to buy it. he tried shooting me a lower price and as soon as I said no he said "ok fine 400 is good". it just didnt feel right from the start. which sucks because i was waiting on another buyer to log back online, but this second dude that tried scamming messaged me while waiting and wanted to do it right that moment. like 5 minutes after this guy, the original one logged back on. =(
or, you could just sell locally and use cash!