Over the past month, I’ve written a series of blog posts about schemes hatched by various Craigslist criminals to separate buyers from their money. The first was about Craigslist rental scams. Housing scams are ubiquitous on Craigslist. Every week I get a Google alert based on published news reports, and rental scams easily make up half of the reports that are published. Needless to say, Craigslist is a poor choice for people seeking to buy a home or rental property.

One of my discoveries concerns the ongoing foreclosure crisis. It seems to have made the rental scam situation even worse, by adding masses of unoccupied homes to local markets which bogus landlords “rent” to unsuspecting tenants (sometimes the landlords are actually former tenants who still have copies of the keys!). The new tenant hands over a deposit and the first month’s rent, but soon discovers that someone else (typically a bank) owns the property.

Today, I wrote about another profitable area for thieves — concert and sporting event tickets. The post is entitled Craigslist ticket scams: Five red flags to look for. Like rental scams, ticket cons are driven by people working remotely (a huge red flag!) who use convincing, compelling stories to get victims to wire money. But unlike rental scams or the trade of bogus/stolen cell phones, Craigslist ticket scams exploit other dimensions unique to the events business. They include rapidly approaching deadlines (which puts more urgency into the deal), the ease of creating fake tickets, and the presence of scalpers operating on the fringe of the concert/sporting events business.

Over the weekend, I took a look at Craigslist terms, which have recently been updated. I am not lawyer and surely missed many of the subtle legal distinctions in the new text, but there were some notable changes by Craiglist’s lawyers. They include:

Removal of specific prohibitions, in favor of broad prohibitions. For instance, pornography was described in detail in the old version, but in the new version it hardly warrants a mention. But there are new sections on posts by dealers, which were not clearly addressed before the February 14 update (Valentine’s Day — any significance?)

I will write an additional post about some changes to Section 4C of the terms, which deal with “flagging” — perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Craigslist for sellers. There is also room to talk about how overly restrictive the terms are, particularly considering the service was founded by Craig Newmark in the 1990s as an embodiment of the open spirit of the early Internet.

Over on my company’s blog, I have just posted “Craigslist category list quietly expands,” after I noticed the company created a half-dozen new “by dealer” categories.

Craigslist is an unusual company in that it seldom announces new features or functionality using press releases, blogs, or other means. To most people, it looks like the site has barely changed since the late 1990s. But change does come, usually in the form of small unannounced feature changes or tweaks to its terms of use.

I only noticed the new categories because I had recorded the old categories last November, and realized that the list had changed sometime in the intervening three months. The new categories were formed by splitting appliances, auto parts, computers, electronics, cell phones and rvs into “by owner” and “by dealer”. Judging by a regular stream of angry comments in the Craigslist forum, many ordinary buyers and browsers were frustrated by dealers taking over the standalone categories, and often using tactics like overposting to drown out the listings from ordinary sellers. The new split categories makes search a lot easier, although as I noted in my blog post, dealers can still abuse the system.