Determine If Your Craiglist Listing Is Fake With This Chrome Extension
Last year, my boyfriend and I started looking for a new location in San Francisco. In addition to the extremely competitive and expensive rental market in the city, as with most of our other sizes, there is also a huge problem with listing scams, especially on Craigslist, which is still the “place” to find an apartment. Basically, people will steal a photo from another ad, sometimes not even in San Francisco, and then post it in the area where people want to live in the city at a rate that will make it pretty profitable. When you email these people trying to see a place, they try to get you to hand over personal information and cash before you do, and then they disappear.
This week I came across a Chrome app that is trying to help detect some scammers. A Chrome extension called Cluck allows users to leave comments when they think something on the site is a scam. It also makes it easy to do a reverse image search in your apartment listing to see where else those photos can be used.
This really makes for easy access to reverse image searches. When you open a new list, you simply click a button above the main image (or any other image that you think looks too good to be true) to see where else it appears on the web. Another page will open with the pasted URL of the post and you can see where it was displayed before.
The idea here is that you can look into this on other sites and see if things get better. For example, an image search might show that the image is also used in Finding Apartments. If you click on a link and the ads there have similar prices, then it’s probably legal. If the apartment finder lists the apartment as $ 1,000 more, or as a furnished weekly rental rather than monthly, then you know something fishy is probably going on.
He also warns of lists that he thinks might be the same as an extra layer of caution if you find something and think it looks too good to be true, but you need a second opinion.
It really takes a critical mass of people for some of Cluck’s comments to be useful. In my experience of apartment shopping, disgruntled users follow who is on Craigslist pretty decently, and the scams are removed pretty quickly. I’m not sure if this feature will ever appear.
That said, reverse image searches are great and can definitely make it easier for you to see all those ads and get around the more obvious fakes.