Anyone who has recently used Craigslist has to have noticed a few things: the rate of success is less and the rate of spam is increased. Take in part the car that I’ve been trying to sell, for about 3 months. I have fielded phone calls from people who want to help me sell it, spam emails from multiple companies… It’s a disaster. In fact, I haven’t received one good lead so far! The worst offender was this week, from a “Gasparro Mccann” (or, gasparomccann11@hotmail.com – for all those spam bots crawling the web). ”Gasparro” mailed me asking if my vehicle was still for sale. So, I responded that it was indeed available. I received this in reply:
Hi There,
Great. When is a good time for me to come by to check it out? I need to make sure I can afford the insurance, but I couldn’t get this thing to go through on my dial up connection. (slowwww) Can you do me a huge favor and go to <link>Auto Quotes</link>and see how much the average price is for our area? Thanks so much!
It was a spam email to get me to go to the above website (link redacted for your safety)! Almost as offensive was a caller who asked me about the car, clearly wasn’t interested in details, and after my description asked if I wanted to list my car on his site. This is getting out of control.
Now, there are some real believers in Craigslist and they can usually point to success stories. But most of these stories seem to surround transactions under $1000.00. Or, even worse, something for free. Right now, as I am renting out one of our apartments and selling a car, I’m getting better leads from more specific sources, such as a VW enthusiast site for the sale of my VW or even setting up some Google AdWords campaigns pointing to landing pages I have built (see them at www.pierrepontgroup.com). I would give Craigslist a SLIGHT advantage with real estate where it seems harder for these scammers to get involved – after all, this is a person-to-person transaction.
What can be done to save Craigslist? Perhaps a login system, or perhaps a call-in system that allows calls to be screened. Similar to how they mask your email, there should be a system like this for phone messages as well. There may be an opportunity here for an entrepreneur to build a system that weeds out these scammers. And spammers. But if they don’t come up with something soon, they will be overrun by niche sites such as Autotrader, or this list of eager competitors.
By the way, if you’ve been really taken advantage of by a scam, be sure to visit Craigslist’s own scam page: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.
