Study Calls Craigslist 'a Cesspool of Crime'

Bala4361 writes "Classifieds site Craigslist has been linked with 330 crimes, 12 murders and 105 robberies or assaults in the United States last year due to anonymous interactions on the site, says a new study. The report calls Craigslist 'a cesspool of crime,' citing murders, rapes, robberies, assault and rental rip-offs as some of the examples." Among the many Reefer Madness-style quotable stretchers from the originating consultancy: "The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with crime." Update: 02/25 17:05 GMT by S : Craigslist has posted a response.

Comments

misunderstandings

[poetmatt]

Is this another idiotic moment where people don't realize that it's easier for police to find crime when you know it's on craigslist? Or is this another AG grandstanding moment?

Re:misunderstandings

[bunratty]

What they're missing is that all of these criminals ingested significant quantities dihydrogen monoxide in the 48 hours before each of these crimes was committed. When will people learn?

Re:misunderstandings

[einstein4pres]

Don't drink and craigslist!

Re:misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. They might as well have declared that the internet is a cesspool of crime, or that populated areas are cesspools of crime.

Re:misunderstandings

[nschubach]

The difference is:

Speed traps make you money.
Criminal traps usually cost you money.

Re:misunderstandings

[NeutronCowboy]

They might as well have declared that the internet is a cesspool of crime, or that populated areas are cesspools of crime.

But they didn't. I'm starting to think that there's a semi-concerted effort going to put Craigslist out of business. First, there was the brouhaha over Craigslist's adult section, which came about because people complained that the personals section was basically a front for adult services. This resulted in much gnashing of teeth, big proclamations by various government and non-government entities that Craigslist was knowingly profiting from the sexual trafficking of minors. Now we get this hyperbolic hackjob of an article that essentially says that Craigslist is a front for criminal gangs.

Really? I'm guessing that there are two groups of people who won't stop before Craigslist just shuts down: corporations whose business model has been completely shot to pieces by Craigslist (any classified ad network), and people who think that it's satanic when two people communicate with each other without either the government or a large corporation listening in.

Re:misunderstandings

[spun]

No, this is a report, funded by a Craigslist competitor, who specifically asked the AIM group to find a link between Craigslist and crime. It is a publicity piece, a smear job, it is not a scientific study. They started from the conclusion they wanted to reach, and worked backwards to find evidence to support that conclusion. They did not put the data into a larger context and compare the incidence of crime on Craigslist with incidence of crime against traditional classified users or other classified websites.

Note that I have no financial interest in any of the companies involved, and no particular love for Craigslist. If they tried the same sneaky, underhanded marketing tactics, I would call them out on it as well. I wonder how many people posting here attacking Craigslist like you are doing are employees of Oodle or the AIMgroup? I mean, if they would pay for a "study" like this, obviously they also would pay for astroturfers, right?

Re:misunderstandings

[thisnamestoolong]

Dihydrogen monoxide? That stuff ought to be banned! It can cause death if it is inhaled, and is the chief component of acid rain!

Re:misunderstandings

[bunratty]

Bingo. The study was done by AIM Group, "Consulting services for interactive media and classified advertising". It's probably in their best interest to shut down craigslist, because craigslist doesn't employ their services. One way is to start spreading FUD about craigslist with fancy-sounding studies that aren't based on any kind of sound reasoning at all.

Re:misunderstandings

[ColdWetDog]

I think it would be useful for somebody to figure out who commissioned the AIM Group for this "study."

Took all of 30 seconds.

The AIM Group has just completed a research project for Oodle, a Craigslist competitor, cataloging crimes that have been linked to Craigslist. And the results surprised even us.

Amazing. A competitor gets a 'research' project funded that says nasty things. The mind boggles.

Re:misunderstandings

[postbigbang]

This is redundant, posted far downthread, but it's important here for scrollers: it's all BS--

See http://blog.craigslist.org/2011/02/more-pay-to-play-research-from-aim/

Re:misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up on a farm, and we were constantly spraying that stuff on plants. It would radically change the way they grew, so you could clearly see a line in a field where it had been applied, and where it hadn't. We even had tanks of it in places, and animals like squirrels and mice would regularly get into it and die, and I'd have to clean out their little corpses as one of my chores. God knows if you tested my body today I'm probably still full of the stuff. Crazy what we used to do before organic farming came along.

Streets

[ivucica]

A lot of crime happens on the streets. What conclusion does that draw?

Re:Streets

[Nethemas the Great]

We must rid ourselves of streets or at least require license to use them.

Which is ridiculous.....

[Antisyzygy]

The same thing could be said about public places. "Since we have built this new park three years ago, there have been 83 people mugged, 8 murders, 125 cases of lewd conduct, 20 cases of prostitution.... etc. etc.". Really, craigslist is just a public forum for commerce and other needs, although it exists on the web.

Re:Which is ridiculous.....

[e9th]

Forget public places. Before the web, we had newspapers. Thieves would scan the classifieds looking for things to steal and the obituaries for the best time to burgle the homes of mourners Con men read the personals looking for the gullible and the lonely. And the ads in the sports section of most big city papers included some really dubious looking massage parlors and escort services. If it weren't for that pesky 1st Amendment, you can bet that every charge that's been laid against Craigslist would have been made against the newspapers.

As they say in Kentucky, Satisticals!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Out of how many millions of ads?

This is why many of us lament the death of math and science in this country. No sense of proportions or priorities.

craigslist unfortunate facts:

[smellsofbikes]

"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with really great deals."
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with bargains that don't get taxed."
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with purchases that don't get tracked by advertisers."
Those are the first things that leap to MY mind.

Ratio

[MozeeToby]

So, what's the ratio of criminals to honest ads? Craigslist claims 80 million classifieds are placed each month, that means that the odds of any one ad being linked to a crime is an amazing 1:2900000. Won't someone close down this cesspool of crime!? Granted, there's plenty of illegal stuff going on in craigslist ads; prostitution, drug selling, etc. I would imagine that is the odds of accidentally becoming the victim crime rather than participating in it.

So let see

[geekoid]

100's of million can access it, and there has been less then 400 crimes.

Yeah, thats a regular hive of scum and villainy ~

AIM Group self interest?

[tickticker]

We are the world’s premiere research and consulting firm for the classifieds industry. We’re widely quoted in the press, including Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

We are experts in developing successful revenue strategies around automotive, real estate, recruitment and merchandise advertising, encompassing print, online, mobile, video and social media.

Which I'll bet includes all types of classifieds and advertising EXCEPT Craigslist.

Anonymous Report Sponsor

[Doc Ruby]

AIM Group doesn't do reports for free, for the public benefit, or for nobody. Some corporation or organization is either paying for this report, or targeted by AIM marketing to buy such research (or just the hypercritical reports). Yet they are as anonymous as the buyers and sellers AIM's report finds to be the root of all Craigslist evil.

I suppose since such anonymous attack marketing is old-fashioned that it's "OK" in some way that Craigslist is not.

Just follow the links.

[spun]

The study was published by "The AIM Group," of which there are two. One is a placement agency for the petro industry, the other is (can you guess yet?) "Consulting Services for Interactive Media and Classified Advertising"

Shorter version of TFA "Don't use the crime infested, but generally free Craigslist, pay our customers to place your classifieds safely, without the fear of VIOLENT RAPE!"

I just love screwing with marketing numbskulls who try to manipulate people into giving them free publicity. Where's your free publicity now, AIM Group?

Follow up, from their home page, they brag thusly:

[spun]

The AIM Group has just completed a research project for Oodle, a Craigslist competitor, cataloging crimes that have been linked to Craigslist. And the results surprised even us.

Yeah. Screw you assholes and your manufactured FUD.

It's not as bad now...

[ChangeOnInstall]

...since they removed the jobs/hired goons section. It's a shame too, as the local one had excellent goons.

So Craigslist is Mos Eisley then?

[GPLDAN]

Luke: You know, I think that R2 unit we bought may have been stolen.
Uncle Owen: What makes you think that?
Luke: Well, I stumbled across a recording while I was cleaning him. He says that he belongs to someone named Obi-Wan Kenobi. I thought he might have meant old Ben. Do you know what he's talking about?
Uncle Owen: Just a fucking Craigslist thing, you know how it is.
Luke: I wonder if he's related to Ben.
Uncle Owen: That wizard is just a crazy old internet pervert. Now, tomorrow I want you to take that R2 unit to Anchorhead and have it's memory erased. That'll be the end of it. It belongs to us now.

Total Perspective Vortex

[dazedNconfuzed]

The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

-- The HitchHiker's Guide

Re:Craigslist == classifieds from all newspapers

[Isaac-1]

It is worse than that, the free nature of CL means the less than reputable sells can post ads over a wide area and run them for a long time waiting for someone to take the bait. Try searching for larger ticket items in the CL listings (things like RV's, camping trailers, generators, or even riding lawn mowers) and see for yourself what a large fraction of ads are obviously scams. It helps to use a helper CL search tool like searchtempest where you can scan all adds within XXX miles, once you find a suspicious ad for a deal that is too good to be true on an item, search for keywords out of that ad on a wider area, and see it listed with the same photo all over the place, but always with a local location..

Connecting the Dots

[TheSpoom]

Report was done by a company called "AIM Group". Go ahead and click through to the site. Check the sponsors box on the right. Notice anything? (In case you didn't click through or have ad-blocking software, I'm referring to the eBay and Kijiji ads.)

Not to mention that they say right in the study that it was commissioned by a Craigslist competitor, Oodle. So they're being paid both directly and indirectly by competitors to Craigslist. Is any of this mentioned in the coverage of the study? Not a chance.

It's a smear paper in its finest and nothing else, especially not a "study".