Last week, a 49-year-old Michigan woman pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man on Craigslist to knock off her husband's mistress.
Last month, a Seattle woman was groped by a man claiming to be interested in the microwave she was selling through the online classifieds site.
On any given day, up to half the apartment rentals featured on Calgary's Craigslist are scams, according to those who monitor the site.
What the heck happened to Craigslist?
A Tacoma, Wash., woman's home was pillaged and trashed after her niece, reportedly seeking revenge in a family squabble, used Craigslist to invite the masses to pop by and take anything they wanted. (Jim Bates/ Associated Press)
Since 1995, the California-based site has helped millions of the jobless, homeless and loveless out of a fix. The 30 million free ads posted on local Craigslist sites every month have become so popular that the site is rivalling newspapers in the classifieds game.
But not if this keeps up.
Recently, Craigslist has made daily headlines as a conduit for crime. From child prostitution rings and alleged murders to scams involving phony puppies, postings have become so clogged with fraudulent ads that some users are turning away from the site altogether.
"It's become infested," says Meg, a social worker who runs Here Be Dragons, a blog that identifies property scams on the site.
"I've been a Craigslist fan for years. It used to be a really interesting place to visit."
Law-enforcement officials in Canada don't track how many crimes are committed using Craigslist every year, but RCMP and Ontario Provincial Police units do regularly troll the site for ne'er-do-wells, said RCMP Corporal Louis Robertson, spokesman for the Canadian anti-fraud centre PhoneBusters.
In the past year, police in Canada have busted a Toronto high-end hooker who lured johns through Craigslist, a Hamilton fraudster who sold $18,000 worth of fake sports tickets through the site and a Toronto scammer who collected thousands of dollars in first and last month's rent for apartments he advertised on Craigslist but didn't actually own.
Authorities across the country have warned of similar apartment scams, which tend to be particularly bad in Calgary and Hamilton.
"Sometimes the rental ads there are 50-per-cent BS," said Meg, who voluntarily patrols Craigslist postings from her home in Vancouver. "I've become pretty good at sniffing them out. For instance, if the poster has 'Reverend' for a title, they automatically go on my list."
And if they make it on Meg's list, she doesn't play nice. She'll either try to have Craigslist block their posts or expose them on her blog, which is why she'd rather not have her last name published.
"I'm doing my very best to be a thorn in their sides," she said. "So I like to keep a low profile."
In the United States, Craigslist-related crimes have become so commonplace that one blogger has launched an entire site devoted to them. Up until last August, Trench Reynolds had been posting Craigslist news items on his main site, mycrimespace.com, "but the Craigslist stories got so big they were taking away from all the other stories on the site."
Now he posts a story or more a day at craigscrimelist.org.
In the nine months since the site went live, he's seen his share of bizarre and sad stories.
One of his early posts covered a Minnesota man who allegedly lured a babysitter to his house through a Craigslist posting and killed her.
In March, a man's home in Jacksonville, Ore., was ransacked after a pair of thieves posted a Craigslist ad saying the house's contents were up for grabs as a way of covering up their own theft. A similar scam happened a little more than a year ago when a woman's home in Tacoma, Wash., was raided after her niece, reportedly seeking revenge in a family squabble, invited the masses to pop by and take anything they wanted. Everything - even the kitchen sink - was taken if it hadn't already been trashed.
Even stranger, a Minnesota man who thought he had hired a prostitute through Craigslist was shot in the jaw after opening his door for the woman. Police say the woman and a male accomplice intended to rob the john all along.
More common schemes involve posting ads for cars and purebred puppies at prices so irresistibly low that buyers send cheques before realizing that the hot rods and pooches don't exist.
After stories of child-sex rings operating through Craigslist surfaced last year, an American anti-trafficking organization launched an international campaign to boycott the site. Craigslist users can flag dubious posts, but the organization, Love146, would like to see the company take a more active role in stamping out exploitative ads.
"I really respect Craigslist's organizational ethos," Love146 spokeswoman Somanjana Bhattacharya said. "But they host pornography and prostitution. How can you be responsible for perpetuating such obscenities on your website?"
Connecticut Attorney-General Richard Blumenthal has been sounding the same drum. In March, he sent a letter to Craigslist demanding the site clean up its act.
"I am astonished and appalled by Craigslist's refusal to recognize the reality of prostitution on its website - despite advertisements containing graphic photographs and hourly rates, and widespread public reports of prostitutes using the site," Mr. Blumenthal wrote.
Reacting to such criticisms, Craigslist recently launched new screening procedures for erotic-services ads and has "additional improvements under way," according to company spokeswoman Sandra MacTavish Best.
The site does ban all illegal activity in its terms-of-use policy, and Craigslist employs an in-house anti-fraud team with about a dozen members, but they have a daunting task considering that about 40 million users post 30 million ads to the site every month.
When investigations lead police to Craigslist, the site's 25-member staff freely co-operates.
"Craigslist is an unwise choice of venue for committing crimes, since perpetrators inevitably leave an electronic trail to themselves that law-enforcement officers can follow," Ms. MacTavish Best stated in an e-mail. "Our staff actively works with police departments, and we even help train officers in using Craigslist."
Law-enforcement officials in Canada agree that Craigslist is not the problem; "It's the people using it who are," Cpl. Robertson said.
But not everyone is so quick to let the company off the hook. Mr. Reynolds recently used a new classifieds site, Flugpo.com, that has more anti-crime measures in place, including a complete ban on erotic-services ads.
"Why couldn't Craigslist follow suit?" he said. "That would go a long way toward eliminating crime on the site. Right now, it's like the Wild West on there. Everything is anonymous and anything goes."
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