TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding craigslist rental scams
AU - Park, Youngsam
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Shi, Elaine
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© International Financial Cryptography Association 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - 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.
AB - 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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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_1
DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_1
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85019764979
SN - 9783662549698
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 3
EP - 21
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - 20th International Conference, FC 2016, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Preneel, Bart
A2 - Grossklags, Jens
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 20th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2016
Y2 - 22 February 2016 through 26 February 2016
ER -