I have ordered a few things and the scoundrel rate is no worse than eBay IMHO. As I recall, the payment is held in some sort of escrow by AliExpress and only after you have received your item and acknowledged to AliExpress that it arrived OK, will they release the payment to the vendor.

Generally though, everything I have been interested that was on AliExpress, I have seen on eBay, Amazon or DealExtreme.