

I've used Craigslist quite a few times in the past, mostly to sell things that are too unwieldy to ship, with generally positive results. Much of the back and forth battle can be followed in various forums. Craigslist hasn't countered that trick yet.

Spammers tried using their own free ringtone sites to get many users to accept the Craigslist verification call, then type in the password from the voice message. Spammers tried using number-portability services like Grand Central and Tossable Digits. Only one account is allowed per phone number. Posting in some categories now requires a callback phone call, with a password sent to the user either by voice or as an SMS message. Its latest gimmick is phone verification. The personals sections were the first to go, then the services categories, and more recently, the job postings.Ĭraigslist is fighting back. Some categories on Craigslist have become over 90% spam. With these power tools, the defenses of Craigslist have been overrun. For spammers preferring a service-oriented approach, there's ItsYourPost. Other desktop software products are AdBomber and Ad Master. Automatic monitoring detects when a posting has been flagged as spam and reposts it.ĬL Auto Poster isn't the only such tool.An OCR system reads the obscured text in the CAPTCHA.note: this does not break Google's CAPTCHA, as you can see in this screenshot.) E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator (ed.IP proxy sites are used to post from a wide range of IP addresses.Random text is added to each spam message to fool Craigslist's duplicate message detector.It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism: CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. Letting users flag postings they recognize as spam.Using a CAPTCHA to stop automated posting tools.Requiring users to register with a valid email address.

