Craigslist Spammer Techniques
I love craigslist. I think it is the essence of what people love about the 'net. It's beatiful because in all it's ugly design and basic GUI, it's a cool marketplace that people love because they can go out and buy and sell stuff for free. It's what the Internet is all about.
Like all the other great marketplaces on the web, spammers are drawn to Craigslist. They crawl through the listings and add thousands of email addresses to their databases. Craigslist has the cool feature that lets you use a craigslist email address for your listing so you don't get your personal email address picked up by spambots. The spammers are very cunning, however. They appear to have figured out a way around this that appears to be working very well. They have their spambots pick up the anti-spam email from Craigslist and then send an innocent-looking email to ask for more information about the job listing or the product for sale. The one I got asked for the website address, which was actually in the job posting. I wondered how the "person" could have missed it, but I replied anyway before I realized it was probably a spammer trying to get my actual email address.
I was talking to my dad on Saturday and he said he got a weird emial from some guy who wanted to have the product (a big screen T.V) shipped to somewhere in Africa. Dad responded asking if the guy was for real. I have a feeling it was another one of those spammers since he didn't mention the product by name and who would really want a big TV gift-wrapped and shipped to Africa?
So let this be a warning to all you Craigs list users out there...if you use the email masking feature of Craigslist, don't respond to weird emails from your listing. If you don't use the email masking feature, the spammers probably already have your email address, so you're out of luck anyway.
As a related sidenote be careful buying event tickets on Craigslist (or any other website for that matter). We recently bought some that turned out to be invalid when we tried to get into the Jazz basketball game :(
Like all the other great marketplaces on the web, spammers are drawn to Craigslist. They crawl through the listings and add thousands of email addresses to their databases. Craigslist has the cool feature that lets you use a craigslist email address for your listing so you don't get your personal email address picked up by spambots. The spammers are very cunning, however. They appear to have figured out a way around this that appears to be working very well. They have their spambots pick up the anti-spam email from Craigslist and then send an innocent-looking email to ask for more information about the job listing or the product for sale. The one I got asked for the website address, which was actually in the job posting. I wondered how the "person" could have missed it, but I replied anyway before I realized it was probably a spammer trying to get my actual email address.
I was talking to my dad on Saturday and he said he got a weird emial from some guy who wanted to have the product (a big screen T.V) shipped to somewhere in Africa. Dad responded asking if the guy was for real. I have a feeling it was another one of those spammers since he didn't mention the product by name and who would really want a big TV gift-wrapped and shipped to Africa?
So let this be a warning to all you Craigs list users out there...if you use the email masking feature of Craigslist, don't respond to weird emails from your listing. If you don't use the email masking feature, the spammers probably already have your email address, so you're out of luck anyway.
As a related sidenote be careful buying event tickets on Craigslist (or any other website for that matter). We recently bought some that turned out to be invalid when we tried to get into the Jazz basketball game :(
posted by Dave @ 9:40 AM
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