May 2008

I received the following e-mail from Greg Collier, CEO of Geebo.com. He seems to have taken a stance on safety and has thrown the gauntlet down at craigslist.

A Call to Action: Make Web Sites Safer!

Check fraud, identity theft, rights infringement, prostitution, child exploitation, property theft, escrow fraud all are daily occurrences on the Internet. Several incidents have become the stuff of urban legend. The man in Oregon who came home to find his belongings gone thanks to a Craigslist ad. The woman who in January posted an ad to hire a hit man. Or take your pick of dozens of sting operation stories involving various types of crimes. In February 2008, sting operations took place in Melbourne FL, Lenexa KS, Wayne County MI, Portland OR, Mt. Juliet TN, and more.

Relevant facts:

·Most Internet crimes are not reported in the media. Most are probably not reported to the FBI either, yet FBI reports of Internet crimes reached the 1-million mark in mid-2007.

·Some Internet crimes are made easier by the practices of certain sites.

Take, for example, the erotic services category on Craigslist. Seattle police and many other law enforcement agencies have had no trouble demonstrating that this section has promoted prostitution. Information Week reports that Craigslist management claims to be taking steps to reduce that particular type of illegal activity on the site, but a quick perusal of the site’s personal, erotic and therapeutic services categories suggests otherwise.

·Where to look: On any city’s version of Craigslist, you’ll find ‘erotic’ just seven lines below ‘sporting’ (the spot where your teen might look for a used kayak).

·Craigslist crimes are becoming so rampant that web sites and blogs are springing up to track them, including crimene.ws.

·Some may call Craigslist prostitution ads ‘victimless’ crimes, but who’s to say that since ads for illegal activity appear here in plain sight, criminals may be attracted to this site and may then move on to other categories where it would be relatively easy to prey on innocent people looking for a job or apartment? In October 2007, 24 yr-old Minnesota resident, Katherine Ann Olson, responded to a Craigslist ad for a nanny and was killed by the man who posted it. Others have been physically assaulted.

Craigslist staff have been quoted as saying that the site is simply too big to monitor. While that might be a significant part of the problem, other sites, large and small, are managing to take such steps. In fact, many sites (PayPal, banking sites, investment sites, and more) would not be able to stay in business if they did not successfully monitor for potential criminal activity.

To prove this is not impossible in the realm of community buying a selling, take a look at Geebo.com, a community site that works much like Craigslist with the important difference being that it is regularly monitored. While both community sites have grown from one to many cities (and both started in northern California), Geebo has a physical presence in many of those cities, and it uses both technological tools and staffing to spot and remove scams and other crimes.

“We can often detect illegal activity pretty easily,” says Geebo CEO, Greg Collier. “Not only can we trace suspicious ads, we actually read the ads on our site, the free postings included. We’re committed to continuing this practice, no matter how big we get. We’ve seen enough of these schemes to be able to spot fraud that our visitors wouldn’t be able to spot for themselves. We want our site to be as safe as we can make it.” Collier would like to see more site owners take action to protect their visitors.

More information:

Where to report Internet fraud: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/april08/ic3_report040308.html

Where to get more info on predators: http://www.fbi.gov/innocent.htm

Types of scams: http://www.lookstoogoodtobetrue.com/stories.aspx

Safety tips for teens: http://72.32.1.50/ (including information on how to report suspicious activity to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)

FBI Guide to Internet safety: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguidee.htm

Those are some bold statements but it’s nothing I disagree with.

I haven’t gotten knee deep into Geebo yet but I hope to have a review up this weekend. From what little I saw so far it was fairly impressive.