How to Punk a CraigsList Spammer

It's hard to keep Spam off craigslist. A free want add service with a huge audience looking for a huge range of things is like chum to these cretins, that's obvious. The offenders come from all over, worldwide spam, national level spam, local spam; it's all spam. Most of it you can convince yourself to just flag and move on but occasionaly, you come across a douche bag in need of some artificial karma.

A few days ago I found three postings one right after another in the Barter section for my town that looked incredibly simmilar, posing  a simmilar trade. On closer inspection, they all linked to the same cheesy, "web developers" site that was a basic stylesheet template with some basic information.

Now at this point, it seems that one of these postings could easily be justified. But why three postings? A few reasons probably. One being external links, another being that he wasn't that interested in actually trading, but drawing traffic to his crappy little site.

My blood gets a little warm and I shoot off an email.

Subject: Your craigslist posting(s)
Body:

John, I just wanted to say that most craigslist users wouldn't appreciate your extra postings you made in the Barter section. Posting in different sections when applicable is considered acceptable, but what you've done is sort of an eye soar.

I only flagged the bottom two. The one with title "Web development for .................... ?" I did not. Could consider removing two of them?

After about 20 minutes came his elequent response.

Subject:
Body:
They are 3 different ads.  Go [expletive] yourself.  If you have time to harass me, get a life.

That's fair enough. He had no reason to listen to me. I wasn't counting on changing his mind and making him repent anyway. At least I did my best.

I went on about my day expecting that it was over, but this sordid situation had not reached the end. About an hour later I check my mail again to see 12 new messages. Each one was a confirmation for some type of mailing list. Many were signups that activated you for several (even 10 or 20) different sites spam lists at once. He just made a pretty gleaming error. To sign me up for those mailings he entered a name, last name, other information and email address. I have no way of telling what he put for these other fields but by using my email address, he was commiting fraud. Several of the listings provided an IP used to sign up. I could use this information to attack him there, but I'm more liable and it will be traced back to me to easily.

I decide I need to arm myself with more information. I do the standard whois, and IP trace, both on the IP used to register his domain and the IP used to spam nuke me. I'm handed back his exact address and a plethera of other information. The IP traces confirm his location.

One valuable piece of information was a secondary email used for his web development "business". I wait until I get home, I don't need to dirty up my employers computer.

When I get home I proxy up before anything else. The next step is to register a clean email address at Yahoo. I email his secondary business email and do some questioning. I phrase things so I don't tell any lies, but let him assume plenty of misinformations.

Subject: A website
Body:
John,

I want to know about your website pricing. To do a site for a contractor local to you, without any complex function what would you charge? Let's say it just needs to provide contact information and whatnot.

Nothing saying who I am, but again, I let him assume he's got a guy on the line. I was shocked... SHOCKED to see that his demener was quite different.

Subject: RE: A website
Body:
I could create a nice design for your site and we could have a few pages about your company, projects and or contact information.  We could also add or edit pages in the future if you needed to add or change something.

Did you have a budget you wanted to work within?  Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks for contacting me and I look forward to working with you on this.

Thanks,
Jon

I try to get the hook further in, by looking like I want to haggle. I know he might be looking for service trades, so I try to tempt him with that.

Subject: RE: RE: A website
Body:
Do you own a home? I can repair lots of things, install anything you wanted to add, etc etc.
If you're not into bartering, if I were confident in your capabilities, we could arrange a cash only deal too, but I'd prefer to negotiate that after I show you more about what I need.

I'm still not a liar, as I already knew I had no confidence in his abilities, the guy can't design anything.

He shoots back:

I actually don't own a home.  I'm renting a flat in [deleted] for the time being. We can still go ahead with the project though if thats OK?  If you want I could give you a call and we could talk about it a little more.  Or you could email me telling me a little bit more about what you'd like to do. 

Have you seen similar websites out there that you like or maybe features of other sites you'd like to incorporate?

I'm now fairly confident that he's bought it. I want to do something fairly harmless and just waste some of his time, but haven't decided what yet.

Sounds good. Why don't we sit down at my office and go over what I'm going to need and what you're going to need. What day would be good for you, my office is in downtown [deleted].

His response was immediate.

Bob, [My fake signing name for my clean email address was actually Bob Dole, by the way]

I could come downtown 12-1 any day this week.  Would Wednesday be OK for you.

Thanks,

Jon

I've got him, right where I want him. It's now that I decide exactly what I want to do. After a quick lookup of which gay bars in my town have the most action I send him my final email.

1:00 Wednesday would be fine for me. Only slight issue is that my carpenters will be in the back shop cutting pieces for a project we're working on.  Meet me at the bar down the street, we can keep it short. I have a few printouts of pages similar to what I'm looking for and a few sketches.

The address of the bar is

[deleted]

If I get there first I'll let the bartender know I'm waiting on you. Do the same and it will be quick and easy to meet up, as I don't like to carry a cell phone.

Now that that's out of the way, I can go back to enjoying craigslist.

I go into the intimate encounters section and post some ambiguous information about how I have a fetish for presidents, and if I happened to be at a particular bar this Wednesday at 1:00pm and someone happened to introduce themselves as Bob Dole, I'd be quite aroused. I also note here that the bartender would know all about my fantasy, if I were there that day.