Nearly Scammed

After winning the O'Day auction I received two suspicous emails. They both claimed to be from eBay, and said that the seller's paypal account was down for a little while and that eBay's protection policy would cover a Western Union money transfer for the transaction. They had all pertinent information on the auction. My ebay name, the seller's name, the item ID, and links to important eBay pages.
So I clicked on the link to Western Union. I was ready to sign up and send the payment when I stopped; something was fishy. EBay always has reminders up on the site that you should never pay through an outside service. Besides that, the seller hadn't mentioned anything about Western Union in his preferred payments. Besides that, the emails just seemed a little off. So I checked my eBay message box, no duplicate messages. That's when I realized, I was almost scammed. I contacted the seller to double check, as I didn't really want to admit that I had almost been taken so easily. He assured me that his paypal was working perfectly, and that he had sent no such messages.
After a series of messages back and forth I got his contact information, and forwarded him a copy of the bogus email which he immediately reported to paypal. Hopefully some scam artist is being hunted down right now, and is about to get what he deserves.
The most amusing part, is that one of the links from the spoof email went to the "how to spot a spoof email" page warning about falsified eBay messages. The thing is, the person who set up this email scam read that page and eliminated almost all the telltale signs.
So I caught the scam before I was taken, but it could have gone either way for a little while there.