Any way to nail a Craigslist fraudster?

I came across what looked like a sweet rental deal being advertised on Craiglist, but I got suspicious when the advertiser kept asking me to fill out a rental application without showing me the house (he supposedly has moved out of town). For those and other reasons, I got wary, and I checked out the house and it is actually listed for sale with a real estate agency (and is now under contract to a buyer).

I have spoken with the responsible agent, and the Craigslist listing is obviously a pure fake.

I have kept in touch with the Craigslist advertiser without giving him any information because I would like to find a way to report him to the Federal Trade Commission or other responsible agency.

Has anyone ever tried to report fraud like this? How do you do it? Has it gotten any results? Any advice?

Notify the Federal Trade Commission and your local police. The FTC has a website set up for this purpose, and Craigslist has a page that links to their online form.

This is the SOP, but I have to wonder along with the OP how many of them ever actually get caught.

Typically, if they succeed in the fraud, they do it by having the victim wire money. So law enforcement would have to get Western Union or whoever to flag the confirmation number of the money wire, and then have the clerk at the window notify police to immediately arrive. If they stall the scammer until the cops arrive, then he or she gets suspicious and just takes off.

Long time lurker here… but wanted to chime in. I use a craigslist alert service (http://clalerts.org) that might come in handy for scam like this. You could effectively find other posts from him very easily.

Hope this helps.

For some reason, this reminded me of a guy that made an effort to scam the scammers.
The site seems defunct now, but he came up with a site called “Anus Laptops.” This guy scammed the scammer into paying shipping costs for a bunch of junk.

I was able to find a copy of the story here: Anus Laptops: The Martins Cole Saga - ScamBaiting at its finest -thescambaiter.com

for anyone who wants to spend the rest of the day laughing.

The scam likely is that you fill out a form with all your personal details and then the scammer steals your identity and opens credit cards and such in your name. This person could be anywhere in the world.

Do you have any emails from this person? What are the “Received:” headers? You may need to view the source of the email since the Received: header is not normally displayed in the email client. Received headers tell each node where the email came from. You may be able to trace the source by following the IP addresses in the fields.