Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9603))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Fraudulently posted online rental listings, rental scams, have been frequently reported by users. However, our understanding of the structure of rental scams is limited. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic empirical study of online rental scams on Craigslist. This study is enabled by a suite of techniques that allowed us to identify scam campaigns and our automated system that is able to collect additional information by conversing with scammers. Our measurement study sheds new light on the broad range of strategies different scam campaigns employ and the infrastructure they depend on to profit. We find that many of these strategies, such as credit report scams, are structurally different from the traditional advanced fee fraud found in previous studies. In addition, we find that Craigslist remove less than half of the suspicious listings we detected. Finally, we find that many of the larger-scale campaigns we detected depend on credit card payments, suggesting that a payment level intervention might effectively demonetize them.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the affiliate program of Rental Verified, which is used by one of the credit report campaigns we found, it pays up to \(\$18\) per customer. https://rentalverified.com/affiliates.

References

  1. 800notes. http://800notes.com/

  2. DB-IP. http://db-ip.com/

  3. Report craigslist Scams. http://reportcraigslistscams.com/

  4. Ripoff Report. http://www.ripoffreport.com/

  5. United States Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/

  6. National association of realtors - field guide to quick real estate statistics. http://www.realtor.org/field-guides/field-guide-to-quick-real-estate-statistics (2013)

  7. Buchanan, J., Grant, A.J.: Investigating and prosecuting Nigerian fraud. U. S. Attorneys’ Bull. 49(6), 39–47 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Clayton, R., Moore, T., Christin, N.: Concentrating correctly on cybercrime concentration. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS), Delft, Netherlands, June 2015

    Google Scholar 

  9. Dyrud, M.A.: I brought you a good news: an analysis of Nigerian 419 letters. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Association for Business Communication Annual Convention (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Gao, Y., Zhao, G.: Knowledge-based information extraction: a case study of recognizing emails of Nigerian frauds. In: Montoyo, A., Muńoz, R., Métais, E. (eds.) NLDB 2005. LNCS, vol. 3513, pp. 161–172. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). doi:10.1007/11428817_15

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Garg, V., Nilizadeh, S.: Craigslist scams and community composition: investigating online fraud victimization. In: International Workshop on Cyber Crime, IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Herley, C.: Why do Nigerian Scammers say they are from Nigeria? In: WEIS (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Huang, J.M., Stringhini, G., Yong, P.: Quit playing games with my heart: understanding online dating scams. In: Almgren, M., Gulisano, V., Maggi, F. (eds.) DIMVA 2015. LNCS, vol. 9148, pp. 216–236. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20550-2_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Isacenkova, J., Thonnard, O., Costin, A., Balzarotti, D., Francillon, A.: Inside the scam jungle: a closer look at 419 scam email operations. In: Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2013 IEEE, pp. 143–150. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Johnson, C.: Fakers, breachers, slackers, and deceivers: Opportunistic actors during the foreclosure crisis deserve criminal sanctions. Cap. Univ. Law Rev. 40(4), 853 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kanich, C., Kreibich, C., Levchenko, K., Enright, B., Voelker, G.M., Paxson, V., Savage, S.: Spamalytics: an empirical analysis of spam marketing conversion. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on CCS. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Konte, M., Feamster, N., Jung, J.: Dynamics of online scam hosting infrastructure. In: Moon, S.B., Teixeira, R., Uhlig, S. (eds.) PAM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5448, pp. 219–228. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-00975-4_22

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Levchenko, K., Pitsillidis, A., Chachra, N., Enright, B., Félegyházi, M., Grier, C., Halvorson, T., Kanich, C., Kreibich, C., Liu, H., McCoy, D., Weaver, N., Paxson, V., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S.: Click trajectories: end-to-end analysis of the spam value chain. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  19. McCoy, D., Dharmdasani, H., Kreibich, C., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S.: Priceless: the role of payments in abuse-advertised goods. In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on CCS, CCS 2012 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  20. McCoy, D., Pitsillidis, A., Jordan, G., Weaver, N., Kreibich, C., Krebs, B., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S., Levchenko, K.: Pharmaleaks: Understanding the business of online pharmaceutical affiliate programs. In: USENIX Security Symposium (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Park, Y., Jones, J., McCoy, D., Shi, E., Jakobsson, M.: Scambaiter: understanding targeted nigerian scams on craigslist. In: NDSS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Rege, A.: What’s love got to do with it? Exploring online dating scams and identity fraud. Int. J. Cyber Criminol. 3(2), 494–512 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Smith, A.: Nigerian scam e-mails and the charms of capital. Cult. Stud. 23(1), 27–47 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Stajano, F., Wilson, P.: Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security. Commun. ACM 54, 70–75 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Stone-Gross, B., Holz, T., Stringhini, G., Vigna, G.: The underground economy of spam: a botmaster’s perspective of coordinating large-scale spam campaigns. In: Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats, LEET 2011, p. 4. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Stone-Gross, B., Moser, A., Kruegel, C., Kirda, E., Almeroth, K.: FIRE: FInding Rogue nEtworks. In: Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Honolulu, HI, December 2009

    Google Scholar 

  27. Thomas, K., Huang, D., Wang, D., Bursztein, E., Grier, C., Holt, T., Kruegel, C., McCoy, D., Savage, S., Vigna, G.: Framing dependencies introduced by underground commoditization. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS), Delft, Netherlands, June 2015

    Google Scholar 

  28. Tive, C.: 419 scam: Exploits of the Nigerian con man. iUniverse (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Whitty, M.T., Buchanan, T.: The online romance scam: a serious cybercrime. CyberPsychol. Behav. Soc. Netw. 15(3), 181–183 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank Markus Jakobsson and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant CNS-1619620. This work was funded in part by NSF grants CNS-1314857, CNS-1453634, CNS-1518765, CNS-1514261, a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, two Google Faculty Research Awards, a VMWare Research Award, and an NSA Lablet grant.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, USA

    Youngsam Park

  2. New York University, New York, USA

    Damon McCoy

  3. Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

    Elaine Shi

Authors
  1. Youngsam Park
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Damon McCoy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Elaine Shi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Youngsam Park .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University Munich, Garching, Germany

    Jens Grossklags

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering-ESAT, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Bart Preneel

Appendices

A Example Scam Ads

(See Figs. 2 and 3)

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Example ad titles with sophisticated templates used by CreditReport_Yahoo campaign.

Full size image

B Example Scam Emails

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Example rent application template. Clone scam campaigns usually request a victim to fill out their rent application form.

Full size image
Fig. 4.
figure 4

Credit report scam email.

Full size image

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Cite this paper

Park, Y., McCoy, D., Shi, E. (2017). Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams. In: Grossklags, J., Preneel, B. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9603. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-54969-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-54970-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation