There is something almost intoxicating about wading through the haphazardly organized cars-for-sale ads on Craigslist:
"Going back to college."
"Got a company car."
"Shipping out to Afghanistan."
After a few pages, a late-model BMW listed for $4,000 because of a nasty divorce followed by a job transfer to Tanzania seems almost . . . credible.
When it comes time to sell a car, no other classified ad service is going to undercut Craigslist's price of absolutely free. Or its zero-hassle factor: Sellers can be completely anonymous. And that makes Craigslist just like the rest of the free-and-anonymous Internet: Everybody is good-looking, the cars are flawless, and the scammers are relentless.
Yes, you can find a good car on Craigslist. If you couldn't, you wouldn't be reading this story. Yet you can find bad cars and bad people just as easily.
A short history of Craigslist
Don't let that ".org" at the end of its URL fool you. Craigslist was incorporated as a for-profit company in 1999 and the .org tag has been kept, the site says, because it "symbolizes the relatively non-commercial nature, public service mission, and non-corporate culture of craigslist."Craig Newmark started Craigslist.org as not much more than an e-mail distribution list among his friends around the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995. Since then it has evolved into a series of community-centered subsites featuring classified listings for selling everything from thumbtacks to kewpie dolls to dungeon-based romance. With most of the classifieds running for no charge whatsoever (there is a fee for some apartment rental, job and "adult services" listings), Craigslist has essentially replaced newspaper classified ads in much of the United States.
That noncorporate culture will make a profit of $88 million to $99 million in 2010. Considering that Craigslist has only about 30 employees, that's an amazing return of about $3 million per employee.
Even if they wanted to -- and they don't -- those 30 employees don't stand a chance of performing any extensive oversight of Craigslist's millions of listings.
If you call the Craigslist offices, you get a pretty standard phone menu: Press 1 for billing, 2 for other paid-ads issues and so on. You press 4 if you're from law enforcement.
Sales and stories
Craigslist generates almost as many anecdotes as it does actual transactions. Throw the terms "Craigslist" and "used car scams" into any Internet search engine (why, we've got one right here!), and you'll find hundreds of tales -- many true and some not-so-true."I've heard numerous tales of car dealers stuck with lemons using Craigslist to make lemonade, sticking their poison fruit on someone else's plate," auctioneer Lang wrote on The Truth About Cars. "And these are just the pros."
For example, unscrupulous dealers sometimes pretend to be private sellers. Sounds harmless enough, right? If they're private sellers, they can skip the federally mandated buyers guide in the window, with its cautions and warnings and clear indicator as to whether the car is covered by a warranty. Rules that force dealers to disclose material defects don't apply. And some states simply don't allow "as is" sales by dealers.
Cars sold supposedly with clean titles sometimes actually have unclear or encumbered titles. Cars from flood areas, cars with inaccurate odometer readings, stolen cars and poorly rebuilt salvage cars that have been shuffled from state to state in a clean-title shell game are all hiding among the legitimate listings on Craigslist.
And sometimes there's no car at all. The ads may be there simply to harvest e-mail addresses for spamming or just to entice the gullible into sending out a check without getting anything in return. "OFFERS TO SHIP CARS ARE 100% FRAUDULENT" Craigslist screams at the top of each automotive listing page warning buyers to stay away from any transaction that isn't local and tangible.
Continued: Knowing what's missing