Top-10 Craigslist Scams

 By Hector Cisneros

Image courtesy Pixabay

I’m old enough that I can still remember when classified ads were printed in newspapers. Then in 1995 a website called Craigslist was launched in San Francisco that provided free classified advertising.  Since that time, Craigslist has grown to cover the entire US plus seventy foreign countries.  It’s also begun charging for some of the classified ads that were once free.  During the past 26 years, Craigslist has had to deal with publicity over several highly publicized crimes that made the front pages of the same newspapers the portal was trying to supplant. To date Craigslist has been linked to everything from solicitation and rape to robbery and murder.  While the website is still the tenth most trafficked site in the US, before you post or respond to your next classified ad there, you need to understand how criminals can use the site to do you harm.  Below is my list of top-10 Craigslist scams and how to avoid being victimized.      

Online Flimflam Factories – Part 2

 By Hector Cisneros

Image courtesy Pixabay

In last week’s post, I pointed out how online slander mills churn and burn people’s reputation for profit.  In this week’s installment, I’ll show you how attorneys and fake attorneys launch spurious lawsuits, or the threat of a lawsuit, to line their pockets.  

The first brush I had with this kind of scam was when a client of mine called to tell me she was being sued because her website had been deemed non-ADA friendly.  When I heard this, I was surprised since I had not only optimized her website for seeing and hearing-impaired web surfers, I had even added a widget that lets anyone who enters the site change the size, contrast and format of her site to their heart’s content.  So, the first thing I told her was to send me the threatening email she received that threatened to take her to court.

Online Flimflam Factories

By Hector Cisneros

Image courtesy Pixabay

Having worked the web since 1993, I’ve seen a lot of scary trends come and go.  Early on there were SEO tactics like “keyword stuffing” and “link farms” that were used to generate page one results on search engines. This allowed unscrupulous online marketing firms to reap more than their fair share of Internet traffic.  Then there were the bait and switch artists who’d routinely get web surfers to click onto a seemingly innocuous site, only to be redirected to one that was blatantly pornographic.  After the turn of the century web trolling and cyberbullying became a way for disgruntled people to harass others in their sphere of influence.  These tactics caused some people who were targeted by this tactic to have nervous breakdowns or in some cases they were bullied to the point where they took their own lives.  While these nefarious online attacks were onerous examples of the web gone wild, the tactics weren’t done to turn a profit.