Wow, CL is nothing but spam now
 

IMO, if they don't change things soon on craigslist, this site will become what Yahoo chat rooms did years ago.

A while ago my gf applied for a few jobs on CL and almost 90% of them were spam. Auto responses saying "please provide a copy of your credit report via this link" or even sites saying to pay $100 for an application fee payable via paypal :1orglaugh

Anyway, on Monday I posted an add for housing... looking to rent a house instead of an apt and my lease is up next month and I have to decide. Ive gotten nothing but spam, but actually looking at the repsonses its bad

18 total replies...
16 spam or scams
- 12 wanted me to get a credit report via an affiliate link and send it to them
- 3 wanted me to send a money order deposit between $400 and $1500 to their "new home" in another state
- 1 wanted me to "take over" the house where their DECEASED daughters ex husband lives. they said they would wire me the money and I would then "buy" the house from them by sending them the contract back with a deposit :1orglaugh:1orglaugh WOW!

of the 2 that were not some type of spam or scam, 1 was completely not even close to where I am looking for and the other is someone looking to rent their grandmothers home out for 2x what you should be paying

honestly, its getting bad on there and the site is now almost useless. personally i know I have been using it less and less, as well i know people looking to hire people are not even posting on CL because they are getting garbage spam.

IMO, I think they need to have a registration system where you need to have an account to email or contact anyone that posts on there... if not this will continue to be a spam/scammer feeding ground

CL put in some good security measures with their last updates, and while they do knock a large number of the smallfry spammers off the map. They have not come even close to stopping the powerful spam operations which really wreak havoc on the listings. I know some bigtime CL spammers and the latest updates had them down for all of about 2 days before they came back and raped CL even harder with minimal competition...

These big spam operations aren't ever gonna leave CL alone...

yeah it's crap.

I quit using it when they started busting hookers.


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CL has implemented many ways of combating spam & scams on their website. But as even the owners of Craigslist have said, "We breed the perfect spammer." There is no way to end it all. Think about it, the site gets more 'help wanted' traffic then Monster.com. They get more traffic then most bigger sites combined so that makes it a big target for spammers.

I'll admit, I used to be a spammer of CL personals section. You could've easily clear $100 a day by posting an ad and then sending the auto response traffic to a dating link. Most ads would get 700+ replies alone from one ad. You duplicate that over 10-20 ads and you have more traffic then you'd ever get from any TGP. Then they started Geo IP blocking and it became a hassle to reset your IP after every post, plus you need plenty of PVA's to keep posting.

Check any blackhat forum and you'll see there are still plenty of people making big money off spamming craigslist. If you have the time and resources to do it then $1k a week is not that hard to achieve.

BTW...here is a pretty cool article on Craig's List by Wired: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/t.../ff_craigslist