

Craiglist introduces phone verification systems; spammers are not happy - prakash
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/craigslist-other-classified-ads-sites/13487-craigslist-phone-verification-system.html

======
Hexstream
I always imagined "underground" stuff like this was on member-only forums...

" _They've just started doing this in the computer services section too. I'm
seriously freaking out now because I make the majority of my income off that
section. I'm a freelance designer.

I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills if I can't find a way around this.
Anyone have a suggestion? Please?_"

What about finding legitimate work that creates value instead of destroying
it?! Fuckwad.

edit: I'm craving for a blockquote feature. Double quotes + italics is a poor
substitute and double quotes alone are downright confusing if there's more
than one paragraph.

edit2: I note that there's 2 requests for a blockquote feature in the
appropriate section and they almost have no upmods. Is that representative of
the opinion about the (non-)usefulness of such a feature? (hope you don't mind
the offtopicness)

~~~
ews
(I work at Craigslist)

It's surprising that most of those spammers forums are totally open although
there are some attacks not described or discused in any of them. Spammers, as
individuals, are far less technical that we think (most of them are just users
and costumers of a limited set of programs) and need those forums to contact
to each other and solve their problems and technical doubts.

It was known beforehand that there would be a phone number and verified
account black market. It's possible to block most of them (most) as there are
federal databases that can be queried for the origin of a given number
(whether is voip,cell or home line).

Making them pay for the priviledge to autopost can lead to interesting
spamming blocking techniques as we just try to increase their cost per post
beyond profit (which is very low for a single post). This is not the only cost
increasing technique we are using but sadly it is impossible to share or
discuss or ask for feedback of any of them on an open forum.

~~~
d0mine
_You do realize that craig is dedicated to this 'game' just as we are. There
are measures he could put in place to rid spam completely, but luckily for him
spam actually inflates the page view statistics for CL. Which in turn drives
up the sales of post for the RE and jobs sections. This is due in part to the
'spam'._

EDIT: It is a _quote_ from the submitted link.

~~~
Hexstream
I really hope I'm misunderstanding.

You're saying spammers benefit CL by dramatically reducing the average quality
of postings down to almost nothing and that the illegitimate page "views" of
bots make up for loss of legitimate page views by actual users that are lost
by aforementionned loss of quality and that Craig actually loves it?

You're out of your mind.

By the way I'm interested in knowing that secret to "rid spam completely" that
Craig sits on.

edit: Really interesting to see the kind of lame excuses people can come up
with. I guess when you're dishonest with everyone then you're also dishonest
with yourself. Or is it the other way around?

~~~
Hexstream
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't read all the posts to the end.

Well, that timely illustrates one of the many problems stemming from the lack
of blockquote! I thought you were writing in italics just for kicks.

------
fdb
One of the blackhats proposed a clever outside-of-the-box solution:

1\. Create a site that promises free ringtones.

2\. Once a visitor enters their cell number, forward it to Craigslist, who
sends a verification call to that number.

3\. Ask them to enter the verification code on your ringtone site.

4\. Redirect the verification code to Craigslist, and send your visitor a
ringtone.

This is how CAPTCHA's got cracked as well: by embedding them into porn.
("Would you like me to take off my dress? Enter this code") It sounds hard to
beat.

Any other outside-of-the-box solutions that you can think of?

~~~
jmtame
I didn't think of that.. pretty creative, and it looks like it would work,
although it's kind of sad that this creativity is going towards blackhat
practices.

------
eznet
Thank God! Craig's List is a cesspool for BS Ads - hopefully this will cut the
craptacular of manipulative ads that have been on there traditionally.

It is f'n funny to see the low-life, scumbag, POS, donkey-raping, child
molestering, masturbating monkeys(wait, Linus reserved that one for the
OpenBSD community) that make up the "professional spammer community" whining
about loosing their free ride. Boo-hoo. Maybe CraigsList will be worth a crap
now.

------
rudyfink
By the end of the thread there is price competition for batches of 100s of
verified accounts. I'm not terribly optimistic in how successful this will be.

~~~
ScottWhigham
But are "100s of verified accounts" scalable? I don't know that "100s of
verified accounts" will make a big, long-term dent. How long before CL cancels
those accounts? I'm sure CL is watching this like a hawk and will shut an
account down quickly and for little reason in an attempt to prevent early
gaming-the-system.

------
comatose_kid
I wonder if it would be worth my while to create a web service that does this
for any site?

~~~
vaksel
this looks pretty much like it <http://www.phoneconfirm.com/>

~~~
comatose_kid
Thanks for the link. I think there is room to improve on the pricing. I wonder
if there are other outfits that do this.

~~~
spolsky
Another one is <http://www.maxmind.com/app/telephone_overview>

This is a classy company, very reliable. We've been using them successfully
for years for fraud prevention in online credit card charging.

~~~
sethg
How does phone verification work with customers who are deaf? Does the API
could provide an option where the computer calling the customer plays Baudot
code [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code>] instead of speaking the
numbers in English?

~~~
pgebhard
Text messages could work in that case, no?

------
kenver
Was anyone else tempted to give that forum a taste of its own medicine!

It's such a shame that they're spending this much effort trying to ruin
something so useful for short term gain.

~~~
rms
fair game

------
vaksel
what they need to do is come up with a better captcha method, ie. right now
all of them are just trying to make the image itself as hard to read as
possible, and for a lot of them you can try 5 times w/o getting wtf the
captcha says.

------
pageman
you can always use vumber and tossabledigits

~~~
comatose_kid
From reading the thread, it seemed that these didn't work, or were not cost-
effective.

