I’m in one of the grey zones for Craigslist. My local area is equidistant to three major Craigslist markets, so to fill the gap, a Facebook-based buy/sell/trade group has cropped up. It has fairly high traffic. I despise Facebook, but created an account so I could tap into the market. I have some problems with this. The user is supposed to be a real person, not a disguised pen name. If I browse the group, and I see that Mary Jane is selling jewellry, I can see virtually everything about her life. Great info for thieves that may want to figure out when she’s at work, when the kids are in school and when the husband is at work. This info is broadcast to anyone and everyone, even people Mary Jane never emailed or telephoned. So you don’t know who could have the information.
When you put an ad on Craigslist, you can glean responses from anonymous emails, or get calls on your cell phone or unpublished number, so the shady characters never find out any particulars about you unless you confide in them. Then you can also always meet in a neutral location.
I’ve noticed FB users of this group try to be clever, by not listing contact details in their ad (stating pm me), but that can be defeated by searching the group for their name, and they have invariably posted their phone number or other info in response to another ad, desperately listing every conceivable way for a seller to contact them, thereby making it easy to figure out the details of a seller.
I wouldn’t want a buyer to know every detail of my life before they contact me. It’s convenient for me as a buyer, because I can see Ms. Mary Jane with the couch for sale has three toddlers, two cats and eight dogs in her house, and her husband weighs 350 pounds, so I’d better pass on the urine soaked, dog hair covered, broke down couch, because she’s likely lying about it’s conditon, but I shouldn’t know that much about her.
We’ve actually had trouble with cattle rustling in the area, so another scenario would be a cattle seller putting pics of their secluded farm on their FB, advertising a cow for sale, and then stating that they would be unavailable to conduct business at a certain time, thereby leaving the door open for the rustlers to show up, knowing no one is around, and rustling livestock.
Does anyone else think such a group is inherently dangerous to sell on?
You can have more than one account if you are worried about it. Just make one with a photo to show you are a real person and leave out other identifying details.
I don’t need a real account. But I did have a fake one that was padded out with a few vague details to make me seem like I was playing the game. Trouble was, I was accused of being a fake person since people’s attempts to facestalk me led to nowhere. Biggest problem was that my fake account had no friends, and I refused to get into the social aspect of it. But with 6,000 members, I say there is no social aspect to it, the group is just too big to trust everyone. I know how to keep from broadcasting my details to everyone, but I’m really asking if such a group is going to lead to misfortune for those that are trusting the system and/or are too lazy to take precautions?