Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams

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.

[1]  Kevin C. Almeroth,et al.  FIRE: FInding Rogue nEtworks , 2009, 2009 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference.

[2]  Monica T. Whitty,et al.  The Online Romance Scam: A Serious Cybercrime , 2012, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[3]  Aunshul Rege What's Love Got to Do with It? Exploring Online Dating Scams and Identity Fraud , 2009 .

[4]  Aurélien Francillon,et al.  Inside the scam jungle: a closer look at 419 scam email operations , 2013, 2013 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops.

[5]  Andrew D Smith NIGERIAN SCAM E-MAILS AND THE CHARMS OF CAPITAL , 2009 .

[6]  He Liu,et al.  Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain , 2011, 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[7]  Stefan Savage,et al.  PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs , 2012, USENIX Security Symposium.

[8]  Christopher Krügel,et al.  Framing Dependencies Introduced by Underground Commoditization , 2015, WEIS.

[9]  Gianluca Stringhini,et al.  The Underground Economy of Spam: A Botmaster's Perspective of Coordinating Large-Scale Spam Campaigns , 2011, LEET.

[10]  Tyler Moore,et al.  Concentrating Correctly on Cybercrime Concentration , 2015, WEIS.

[11]  Frank Stajano,et al.  Understanding scam victims , 2011, Commun. ACM.

[12]  Nick Feamster,et al.  Dynamics of Online Scam Hosting Infrastructure , 2009, PAM.

[13]  Cormac Herley,et al.  Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria? , 2012, WEIS.

[14]  Markus Jakobsson,et al.  Scambaiter: Understanding Targeted Nigerian Scams on Craigslist , 2014, NDSS.

[15]  Vaibhav Garg,et al.  Craigslist Scams and Community Composition: Investigating Online Fraud Victimization , 2013, 2013 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops.

[16]  Gianluca Stringhini,et al.  Quit Playing Games with My Heart: Understanding Online Dating Scams , 2015, DIMVA.

[17]  Gang Zhao,et al.  Knowledge-Based Information Extraction: A Case Study of Recognizing Emails of Nigerian Frauds , 2005, NLDB.

[18]  Chris Kanich,et al.  Spamalytics: an empirical analysis of spam marketing conversion , 2009, CACM.

[19]  Stefan Savage,et al.  Priceless: the role of payments in abuse-advertised goods , 2012, CCS.