It makes me deeply depressed that real estate is huge right now, many more people than ever are renting and we still have to deal with Craiglist scams to find a place to live. Ignoring the fact that the last ten years of UX seems to have passed Craiglist by, it's unbelievable that such a huge site has the absolute minimum of fraud prevention. There are so many comments on here about various kinds of CL scams, why does a trusted marketplace for rental housing not exist?
With these sorts of marketplaces, the major challenge is trying to get small landlords to list. Of course the sites want their listings to be legitimate, though, so there's a tension between making it easy for posters and getting enough information and verification to be able to detect and weed out scammers.
The problem is that scam posts are frequently just copied legitimate posts. The only thing we found that worked was to force communication to go through a messaging proxy to run classifiers on those messages.
