Newfoundland

Scam offers apartments that aren’t available:

The rental scam is not exclusive to craigslist or the U.S. In Saint John, Newfoundland, Canada the rental scam has turned up there on Kijiji.

In this flavor of the scam the scammers say that the landlord is unavailable but they’ll send the keys once they receive the deposit. Of course there are no keys and they run off with your Loonies.

However this got me to thinking. Geebo.com, be patient you’ll see where this is going, to my knowledge has never been in the news in a negative light. And I’ve searched, I hold Geebo to a higher standard than the other sites since I’ve given it my seal of approval.

Anyway I asked my friend Geebo CEO Greg Collier how does Geebo prevent these real estate scam ads from popping up on Geebo since it would require more than a visual inspection. This was his reply…

Geebo receives virtually no fraudulent listings because we spot them coming a mile away. Scammers tried in the early days to get them up but we would immediately remove them so after repeated unsuccessful efforts to post that stuff to our site they finally gave up. Now that everything goes into a queue first before going live it is even more difficult for them to slide that stuff by.

Even our personals category sees very little scandalous activity for the same reason. We simply no what to look for.

Craigslist and others simply don’t care which is why you see so much of that stuff going on over there. We are committed to keeping our safe clean, even more committed to keeping our users safe.

Isn’t that refreshing to hear instead of the usual PR crap we get from other CEOs?

I’ve said it before community policing can’t be trusted on sites like Kijiji and craigslist. It just doesn’t work.

Kijiji crime #19
Real Estate post #95