What percentage of the women seeking men or women seeking couples are actually what they purport to be? If they are not real, what are they? Prostitutes? People trying to trick people into sending them personal information (credit card numbers, etc.)? Serial killers trying to lure victims? Anyone have experience with this?
How would anyone actually know this? The best you can hope to get are a few anecdotes, but that’s different than knowing the answer to your question. I doubt any kind of study has been done.
I’ve never had occasion even to look at Craig’s List. I’ve heard of it, but the vast majority of my information about it comes from threads on this Board. It seems to be a hotbed of scams and trickery. (I mean Craig’s List, not this Board.) What the hell is up with that site?
I doubt that as well. Just hoping for anecdotes. Someone who has tried contacting some number of these women surely has a rough approximation of how many turned out to be legitimate.
It’s not inherently evil, anymore than the Internet is inherently evil because there are fake websites. It’s a great way to find used items for sale, or an apartment to rent. It is mostly trustworthy, but you always have to keep your eye out for scammers.
Since the OP is looking for anecdotes, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The more attractive they appear the higher the likelihood they are fake. The greater the extent they talk about simply wanting sex the higher the likelihood they are fake. So if you see a woman you would rank about a 4 (out of 10) and who talks about her two kids it is very likely the real thing.
There aren’t enough females advertising in the CL personals to establish any meaningful statistics. The vanishingly few numbers of them is, itself, the only meaningful statistic.
If you want to study enough CL personals ads to get a sample size adequate for any statistics, you need to dig into the m4m section.
One of the shticks on the podcast Uhh Yeah Dude involves reading the ads aloud. Hilarious stuff.
Based on an informal survey, the results seem to vary wildly from city to city. Some places, there’s a constant stream of ads which are reported and closed, so they’re probably prostitutes. Other cities (New York, for example), they probably SHOULD be reported and closed, but for some reason aren’t… they list phone numbers, they mention that they’re looking for “generous men”…
If you were also to peruse the listings of couples looking for men and notice the same images, chances are they’re legit.
That’s not true at all. I’m pretty sure that after you exclude spam for hookup sites and porn sites, almost all whores, but there are a lot of them.
It’s 8:30 AM and there are literally 400 new ads today by women looking for men in the nyc site alone. Of the 400 I bet a few dozen are actual whores you could buy, and surely we don’t need to limit ourselves to 8 hours of ads in 1 city.
“Vanishingly few” is probably the most incorrect thing I’ve read all week.
Random capiTalizaTion of the leTTer t = meTh.
I’m confused. Are almost all of the 400 whores or are a couple dozen whores?
Most are non-human. For example, a spambot that tries to get you to buy a paid membership to some hookup site by pretending to be a real human. Naturally a computer program posing as a woman doesn’t count as a woman.
But of a sample of 400, a significant number are going to be actual women. Of that group - my “couple dozen” - most are whores.
When I was single and happy to enjoy no strings attached sex I met a lot of women on Craigslist by posting my own ads. I got lots of spam and occasionally propositioned by prostitutes, but I actually met real live non-whore women for sex too.
All I know is craigslist is the Walmart of online dating sites.
You may find a good deal, but you may also end up tied up in the trunk of a stranger’s car.
Real life is safer.
That way, you end up in the trunk of a car belonging to someone you know.
I think they prefer “independent contractors”.
The Vegas craigslist casual encounters W4M section is almost all hookers. Other cities have a much higher signal to noise ratio it seems. But I would say at least a third of those are bullshit.
The obvious bullshit ones look like they were written by someone with English as a second language with no effort at all. They’ll all be generic and not ask for anything too specific.
There’s another class of fake ads which are much more insidious. They’re real ads from real people, so they pass the eye test as far as being legit, but they’re actually stolen by bots from other cities on craigslist and reposted. These especially suck because you might find a well-written post by someone you think might be pretty great, and you take the time to write a good reply, and boom, you get a spam reply back. You can try to figure these out by googling unique lines in the ad and seeing if ads from any other city pop up.
Ads that are more specific are generally more genuine. Someone listing a particular situation or fetish or whatever are more likely than generic OH I’M A HOT GIRL AND I LOVE COCK sorts of messages. You still run into the repost from another city problem with those, though. And obviously the more appealing the ad, the more likely it’s going to be spam - that hot 19 year old willing to post naked pics on craigslist is probably not legit. The more specific their requirements are, the more likely it is to be legit. There are so many men for every woman that, well, just like regular old bar hookups, she can be more choosey. So the girl who says “I’m a 19 year old gymnast and I’ll fuck anyone no matter how old or how out of shape” is going to be spam, but a girl who demands that you be 18, muscular, drive a Ferrari, own a Yacht, love to give oral, and have a 8" dick is legit. Incidentally, from what I’ve noticed, women with such requirements are usually in their 40s, well over 200 pounds, and probably are on foodstamps. But they know they deserve the best.
Also, if your city is made of many districts or suburbs, but they post their location as the city listed as the craigslist ad, they’re more likely to be spam. In Cleveland for example, all of the ads which read “Cleveland” are going to have a lot more spam than the ones that say Westlake or Parma.
But you get a much better response if you post your own ad. You’ll get lots of spam, but it will be obvious spam that you can delete immediately. But you’ll get a lot more genuine responses. Especially if your ad features something unique. There are a million guys offering generic “HEY I WANT SEX” ads, but the “I have a goat carcass and I know how to use it” fetish may be untapped. Maybe only a few girls in your city are interested in that, but you’ll have 100% of that market.
So, post your own ad, show a little personality, come up with something specific that you’re interested in focusing on. That doesn’t have to be a fetish or specific sexual thing, necessarily. Maybe it’s an unusual time you’re usually available, or the sort of personality you’re looking for, or something along those lines.
That said, every girl you meet on there is still going to be crazy. You just have to hope for a benign sort of crazy.