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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams

Authors : Youngsam Park, Damon McCoy, Elaine Shi

Published in: Financial Cryptography and Data Security

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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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.

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next chapter Graph Analytics for Real-Time Scoring of Cross-Channel Transactional Fraud
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
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.
 
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Metadata
Title
Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams
Authors
Youngsam Park
Damon McCoy
Elaine Shi
Copyright Year
2017
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book
Financial Cryptography and Data Security

Print ISBN: 978-3-662-54969-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-662-54970-4

Copyright Year: 2017

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

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