Gumtree, flathunting and scammers! aarghgh!!

hartcjhart

yep I had a similar thing happen,looking for a place in Kegworth,got an email from scammer offering me a place and he also sent a postcode for said flat,checked it and sure enough I know the building where the flat was,he then sent me the pics of the interior,well it was like looking inside Buck House,ballroom/stateroom it must have been the ruddy Tardis:rotfl::rotfl:

Gumtree_company_representative

Yeah the inconsistencies in their facts can be hilarious and a great source of entertainment if you are bored. I once got a pet scammer to assure me that he could deliver me a goose that lays a golden egg (which I had been desperately searching the world for of course) after I paid the money via Western Union.

dacouch

Gumtree_company_representative wrote: »

Yeah the inconsistencies in their facts can be hilarious and a great source of entertainment if you are bored. I once got a pet scammer to assure me that he could deliver me a goose that lays a golden egg (which I had been desperately searching the world for of course) after I paid the money via Western Union.

Its not just the flats and items for sale you have to be careful of, you have to excercise extreme caution when dealing with the Job Adverts as a lot of them are just there to get you to send your personal details or for superious jobs reviewing adverts and need you to complete a questionnaire. I suspect most of these just want your personal details most of them for scam purposes.

It would be helpful if Gumtree adopted a similar system to MSE eg you could report adverts or even better could log in and leave a message attached to the advert, this might help stop some of these scams. Of all the people I know everyone says gumtree can be useful but us so full of scams. The site owners do not seem to do anything to try and stop them.

competitionscafe

If Gumtree are not careful it will be ruined by scammers and spammers as Craigslist has been in the US. Which would be a shame as it's one of the few places to find private landlord flat/house lets (usually cheaper and much less hassle than an agency if you find a good landlord).

Gumtree_company_representative

dacouch wrote: »

Its not just the flats and items for sale you have to be careful of, you have to excercise extreme caution when dealing with the Job Adverts as a lot of them are just there to get you to send your personal details or for superious jobs reviewing adverts and need you to complete a questionnaire. I suspect most of these just want your personal details most of them for scam purposes.

It would be helpful if Gumtree adopted a similar system to MSE eg you could report adverts or even better could log in and leave a message attached to the advert, this might help stop some of these scams. Of all the people I know everyone says gumtree can be useful but us so full of scams. The site owners do not seem to do anything to try and stop them.

Hey, we do take scam and spam very seriously. We have a lot of measures in place to deal with this unlike most other sites. We have found in the last few months that they have gotten a lot smarter and in turn, we are upping our technology to deal with a lot of this. These are huge technical asks so will take a while to come into play

Altarf

Gumtree_company_representative wrote: »

These are huge technical asks so will take a while to come into play

But wouldn't it be professional to think about these things first, and not hopefully have something in place at sometime in the future, maybe.

Gumtree_company_representative

Well when Gumtree started in 2000, these weren't such major issues. There were some fail safes in place so thought was put into it. But these soon got breached and we reacted by upgrading our methods. It's kind of like an arms race, as the others get smarter, so do we.

We're constantly improving our methods to keep the site clean and at the moment are looking at a different approach which will block unwanted access altogether. We do currently catch most of the bad ads well into the 90% region.

I would love to be more specific about the details but as you can understand, if I did give anything away, this would help the bad guys work a way around it!

Altarf

Fair enough, we agree then, you did start without thinking about these things first, and hopefully will have something in place at sometime in the future that will catch some of the scammers, maybe.

Gumtree_company_representative

Ha ha! I'll settle for: We started out not thinking these things would get as big as they are now!

Altarf

Gumtree_company_representative wrote: »

We started out not thinking these things would get as big as they are now

And when did you quite realise that things had got out of control?