How to lose $1000 over the internet.

This all happened about a year and a half ago. I’m a so-so regular poster on the two plus two forums which is one of the biggest online poker forums. There is a “person to person” transfer thread that I like to follow. In online poker, there are about 4 big online poker rooms. The two biggest are Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars. The two smaller ones are CakePoker and UltimateBet. And sometimes, people have money on one site, but want to transfer the money to another site. I found this thread and saw that it was a somewhat easy way to make some money. It is common for someone to say something like “Have 100 on Stars, want 95 on FTP”. So the $5 vig would go to me for the “service.” I got addicted to this. I would make $10 here, $5 there, and sometimes people were in desperate need and would pay vigs as high as $20 (One guy sent me 100 on one site, and I only had to send 80 to him) This probably sounds shady (and it probably is), but the fact that other people had to send first, made it seem pretty safe. However, there is always a risk involved. For example, if someone steals a credit card, they can put $ on to a site, but the money will show up as fraudulent in about a day or two. But before the money gets flagged, they can trade with someone to receive clean money on another site. So blah blah blah, one day I get a private message from this name “TEAM ANGLE” saying that he wants a trade of $1000 from Stars to FTP. I spent about 30 minutes talking to this guy on AIM trying to make sure he is legit. He showed me screenshots of him playing and his results. I googled “team angle” and saw that he is a winning player blah blah blah. He wanted Bank of America money for his Stars money (which is pretty common). If I remember correctly, it was something like $1100 of his Stars money for $1000 of my Bank of America money. How can I turn down a free $100. So we end up trading and I’m feeling pretty good about myself.
However, in the morning, I get the most depressing email of my life. It goes something like “We regret to inform you that you have received $1,100 in fraudulent funds. Your account is now under investigation. Please reply with your relationship with the following player “TEAM ANGIE”. I couldn’t believe it. In many cases like this, the $1100 would get confiscated from my account and I am the one who is out of the $$$. I got scammed like a bitchhh. The whole time I thought I was dealing with a player “Team Angle” but instead this scammer had the name “team angie”. He switched the L with and I. And so gg me.
So, I’m panicking and do not know what to do. So, here’s the situation so far. I sent $1000 in Bank of America money (clean), and have $1100 in Poker Stars money (dirty). So what else would someone do in my situation? The correct answer would be to sit tight and wait til Poker Stars finishes their investigation. But what did I do?
I tried as quickly as I could to “trade” all my dirty Stars money to some random person on twoplustwo. Haha
It worked, well kind of. I had a good reputation at this point on 2plus2, and easily sent all BUT $400 of my Stars money in exchange for clean Full Tilt money. So, at this point I’m still freaking out and finally have to go outside for a run. I get back and stare and refresh yahoo to see the inevitable email from Stars. They finally send me an email asking why I would send money to people knowing that my funds were “fraudulent”. I forgot what I said, but I knew I was in trouble. They asked for all different kinds of identification and my explanation of the situation. But blah blah blah, in the end, Stars takes $1100 from my Stars account (which leaves me break-even). I actually had a negative balance, of -600. I deposited my account with 700 and stars instantly took $600. I was relieved to say the least. And that was the last time I made a bigger trade than I’m comfortable with.