Got Spam from Robots@Craigslist.org? Don’t Click on It!

If you receive email from robots@craigslist.org, with information that someone forwarded to you, don’t click on it! This is a new Craigslist scam, where the spammers are using the Craigslist ’email to a friend’ feature to spam you. Here’s how it works.

Actual Craigslist listings from one of the below spam. Don’t try this at home!

The scammers post their own Craigslist listing, and then they use the Craigslist ’email to a friend’ option to spam you about the listing.

Clicking on ’email to a friend’ brings up this very simple page:

Now, almost certainly these spammers have scripted this, so that their script grabs email addresses and auto-populates the ‘your address’ and the ‘destination address’ fields automatically. But even if they haven’t done that, there are people offshore who are willing to do this sort of work manually for pennies per address.

Anyways, the bottom line is that if you get email from robot@craigslist.org that looks like one of the ones below, delete it without clicking on it.

If you get an email from robot@craigslist.org and it seems like it was actually sent by a friend, forwarding a listing in which you might be interested (say, for example, you are househunting, and your friend sees a real estate listing on Craigslist in which they think you might be interested), instead of clicking on the link, first confirm with your friend that they actually sent it.

Actual Craigslist ’email to a friend’ Spam

From: robot@craigslist.org
Subject: we would save with solar http://SOLARNOW.tk
Date: March 29, 2016 at 4:56:55 AM MDT

If you don’t want to receive email-a-friend messages, please go to:
https://accounts.craigslist.org/eafprefs/U2FsdGVkX18yNjc2NjI2Nwr3YLQidIirjB_CIYqJkhwSxMZmzRu2xriD2_CjTzU_8TEsbZVR93dYYVKRj7C-dQ

And here is another one:

From: robot@craigslist.org
Subject: solar is all the help you need http://SOLARNOW.tk
Date: March 29, 2016 at 10:50:00 AM MDT

If you don’t want to receive email-a-friend messages, please go to:
https://accounts.craigslist.org/eafprefs/U2FsdGVkX181Nzk1NTc5NSmGD2McKBlr7D6cSqcix_xKVu35AHc9SoWIW6GROQUEj1Mhwd_YHaDog6whkWxOmA

Summary

Article Name

Got Spam from Robots@Craigslist.org? Don't Click on It!

Description

If you receive email from robots@craigslist.org, with information that someone forwarded to you, don't click on it!

Author

Anne P. Mitchell