Sirened

For years Craig’s List has been the place to find everything from jobs, event tickets, antiques to gay midgets wearing pink feathers ready to show up on your door step to give you a good spanking. Craig’s List ranks 7th in traffic amongst English language websites, receiving about 9 billion page views a month.

These days though, Craig’s List has become as well known for its scams as it is for legitimate content. Luckily many of the scams are pretty obvious, like anything that involves the country of Nigeria. It’s amazing how unoriginal many of the scam artists are, so many involved in apartment rentals are “Nigerian ministers” with poor English grammar who want you to take good care of their property, blah blah, send them the money and they’ll send you the keys. Type in just about any city in the world on Craig’s List and you’ll find these “ministers.”

When my wife and I recently relocated from Tampa, FL to Amsterdam, Netherlands we were extremely frustrated at the difficulty in finding legitimate apartment listings for Amsterdam on Craig’s List. But part of me kept thinking, why are they all in Nigeria? Aren’t there people in say Burma or Somalia that want some of this action? There’s plenty of dirt poor countries out there, why is it always Nigeria? And if I went to Nigeria, how easy would it be to actually meet some of these “ministers?” (By the way, if I do this trip I’ll be sure to let you guys know!)

The founder of Craig’s List, Craig Newmark, prides himself and his tiny staff for offering a great service at little to no cost and for not having sold the site for a few billion dollars. Craig and company argue that because of the large amount of transactions and anonymity they have no idea how much money, items and sexual favors pass through the site each day. Craig’s List does have a flagging system for scams but many believe this isn’t enough. Some feel that people should be able to leave direct comments on a post they know is a scam. Others believe there should at least be a $1 fee to post something in order to reduce scams.

Personally, I think that a spam bot should remove any post that includes “Nigeria” and “minister” in it. At the very least this would allow the people of Cameroon to take advantage of the highly lucrative Craig’s List scam business.

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