Just five gangs in Nigeria are behind most Craigslist buyer scams

The bogus buyers got in touch over email. To track where the scammers were based, Jones and McCoy responded with emails containing images of the products offered for sale. When the link was clicked on, the scammers real IP address was revealed.

Five Nigerian criminal gangs are behind most scams targeting sellers on Craigslist, and they’ve taken new measures to make their swindles appear legitimate, according to a new study.

In a new innovation, they’re using professional check-writing equipment plus U.S.-based accomplices to not raise suspicions among their victims.

“I think the most surprising thing was the number of people in the U.S. participating in this scam,” said Damon McCoy, an assistant professor in the computer science department at George Mason University, in a phone interview.

McCoy and colleague Jackie Jones, of George Mason’s information technology department, seeded Craigslist with advertisements for laptops to see if they could attract scammers who target sellers.

Craigslist has many protections to weed out fraudulent product listings, “but little effort has been made to protect legitimate users receiving responses from fraudulent buyers,” according to their paper, due to be presented on Sept. 24 at the IEEE eCrime Research Summit in Birmingham, Alabama.

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