It seemed like a good deal.
Rachel Aviv, a 23-year-old journalist, had found through Craigslist. org a studio apartment on the Lower East Side for $900 a month. She met the studio’s leaser in a bar, gave her $490 in cash to land a sublease, and showed up on a June Wednesday to start making the nook in the trendy neighborhood her new home and found that 16 people had already arrived that day to do the same thing.
A woman Aviv called “Rita” in a recent essay for the Village Voice on her hassle duped 33 people out of more than $60,000 in rent and security deposits. Rita showed them all the same studio, which belonged to a friend. The friend had given Rita a spare key, forgotten about it, and Rita had shown the studio while the friend was at work. Rita was safely in Germany by the time the scam unraveled.
“I’d like to think of her as some life-endangering, world-class criminal,” Aviv wrote of Rita, “but few law officials I spoke to seemed surprised by the incident.”
The “Craig” in Craigslist hopes to make Aviv’s experience one of the last through his URL.
Craig Newmark said he is about halfway through a two-year effort to stop such scams on his site, which he started in 1995 as a resource for San Francisco. The site quickly grew, adding New York City in August 2000, and now commands 2.5 billion monthly hits from 170 cities. Users can post free ads for everything from vintage albums to houses, making Craigslist one of the purest and most accessible forms of Internet commerce ever.
But this ease carries a cost.
“We do have bad guys hitting the site now and then,” Newmark said. “In particular, since we’ve become a significant rental resource for people in New York and since there is an occasional ethical issue with an apartment broker, my biggest single project has been dealing with them.”
Newmark said he contacts suspect brokers. He said he tells them he’s concerned about their practices on the site, and sends them the guidelines they need to follow should they want to continue posting on Craigslist. Newmark declined to say how his site recognizes an unethical broker, citing a need to keep strategies vague.
If a broker who’s been given the guidelines doesn’t abide by them, Newmark blocks them from Craigslist.
The guidelines include both common sense as well as mild legalese. Brokers cannot post ads anonymously and cannot post more than 25 per day. Ads also must be for a specific location.
Newmark said most New York brokers are ethical, and he has not had to block that many relative to the thousands in New York both brokers and individuals who use his site to hawk rentals.
Newmark has worked with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to catch at least one scammer: An Upper East Side man was sentenced in December 2003 to five years probation and forced to pay $1,746 in restitution for scheming to defraud people through Craigslist.
It was around 2003 that Newmark began hearing from Craigslist users in New York about scams. Newmark seemed to recognize what scams could do to the reputation of a URL steeped in a decidedly San Franciscan ideal of people all over the world sharing information honestly: “We’re a community service and we take this all very seriously.”
As for Aviv who did, in fact, speak with Newmark about the scam that snared her she bounced back relatively fast real estate-wise. She has a place in Brooklyn, she told The Real Deal a few weeks after her ordeal. (Rita remains at large.)
“People’s instincts are good,” Newmark said, “and if they have a bad feeling about [an ad], contact me.”