Craigslist Warnings

Craigslist is VERY popular with criminals.  These unscrupulous people are intent on using their technical skills combined with social engineering skills in order to devise schemes and scams that trick you to disclose personal information (DOB, SSN, Credit Card Nunbers, etc.) and ultimately to steal your money.

Note: Please keep in mind a couple of things.  The examples below provide you a sense of the types of schemes the criminals use.  They are always changing the "details" of their approach, but the over-all schemes have fairly typical traits so you need to be aware of the "typical" traits so that it will raise a flag when you encounter variations of the details.  Also, Craiglist is given as an example because it's so popular and well-known, but the examples below can be applied to many other applications on the internet in which the criminals are applying similar tactics and schemes.

Type: Responses to an Ad in Craigslist

Overview: When you place an ad on craigslist it becomes available for viewing by anyone around the world who has internet access.  Unfortunately, a good number - and increasing number - of responses are going to be from criminals, such as the ones below:

Example 1

Summary: The responder to the ad below is using social engineering tactics in order to get the poster of the ad to click a hyperlink that will cause their computer system to be infected by malware.  Since the poster is selling something, perhaps he would be interested in making loads of money with little effort.  The criminal often isn't afraid to push the limits of the old warning - "if it sounds too good to be true it probably isn't".  And it works on people, especially young people and even desperate people.  Read the criminal's reponse below:

What to do:

    Delete the e-mail immediately

What not to do:

    Never respond to these e-mails, as they will collect your e-mail and sell it to other criminals, as well as using it themselves with future scam attempts. 

Example 2

Summary: The responder to the ad below is attempting to get you to believe that she is also from the same area.  What's interesting is that the name in the From field doesn't match the name found in the body of the text.  The scammer is trying to raise your curiosity by being vague enough so that you will click the link contained in the text - BUT DON'T CLICK IT!

When this URL is entered into one of the many internet security monitoring databases, it displays a severe warning about going to this web address:

Note: These internet security monitoring sites (like McAfee SiteAdvisor) do NOT reflect the entire internet and the current status of any given internet address can change (usually for the worse).  So, if the site hasn't been tested yet, you have to assume it is a dangerous site.  In the example above, the results along with the obvious scam e-mail should convince you that this web site is to be avoided! 


What to do:
Delete the e-mail immediately


What not to do:
Never respond to these e-mails, as they will collect your e-mail and sell it to other criminals, as well as using it themselves with future scam attempts.




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