It is sad that this person got scammed, and there are a lot of legitimate comments in this article. But I have to admit that at first I thought the "scam" was going to be that these $200 smart smoke alarms aren't a real product. Certainly for me, the risks of adding such complexity to such an important product are not worth it, especially at 10x the cost.

I would also be extremely frustrated with the outcome but I have to wonder, why not sell these smoke detectors if the secondary market availability is so bad and other people have the same problem? My first guess is that options like eBay have just become to onerous to be the amateur seller such sites were originally created for?