Gumtree, flathunting and scammers! aarghgh!!

dacouch

Funnily enough Ebay who own Gumtree pay lip service as well to dealing with scammers....

There would be fairly simple ways of stopping some of the scams eg blacklisting the IP addresses and / or email addresses of known scammers. Having a system where people can click on an advert to report it and allowing some or even just selected people to add notes to adverts that they are scams.

At the moment some people place an advert themselves to draw peoples attention to a particular scam advert.

The vast vast vast majority of people who use Gumtree do not read the forums / blogs so that is not the answer.

Gumtree is a good resource but has a huge amount of scams on it, if they are not carefull they will lose the publics confidence.

If you want advice on ways to make it safer I'm sure there are plenty of us who use it regularly who can give you advice

BFG_2

Be careful some flat rental scammers ask you to send money to YOURSELF via Western Union and merely email them a copy of the docs, ostensibly to 'prove you have funds for a deposit'].......which sounds safe enough.......but

They then use fake id and details from the docs to get the money out from Western Union for themselves [Watchdog ran this a few months back?]

Gumtree_company_representative

dacouch wrote: »

Funnily enough Ebay who own Gumtree pay lip service as well to dealing with scammers....

There would be fairly simple ways of stopping some of the scams eg blacklisting the IP addresses and / or email addresses of known scammers. Having a system where people can click on an advert to report it and allowing some or even just selected people to add notes to adverts that they are scams.

At the moment some people place an advert themselves to draw peoples attention to a particular scam advert.

The vast vast vast majority of people who use Gumtree do not read the forums / blogs so that is not the answer.

Gumtree is a good resource but has a huge amount of scams on it, if they are not carefull they will lose the publics confidence.

If you want advice on ways to make it safer I'm sure there are plenty of us who use it regularly who can give you advice

Hey you'll be happy to know that we use all those methods you mentioned and more. The main issue we have at the moment is that the bad guys are using advanced proxies to change their location on every post so we are looking into an advanced system to deal with this.100s of IPs and emails get blacklisted on a daily basis and there is a 'report this ad' button at the top right of every ad which gets instant attention when reported.

We also have advice on the blog, forums, stay safe section on the site and are even releasing some help videos shortly. Based on all of these initiatives and the new ones we are constantly working on, I think its fair to say that we don't just 'pay lip service'.

trisontana

As this news article shows, Gumtree is being used by other crooks and criminals.

Gumtree_company_representative

Yeah its true it does happen on Gumtree and similar sites but that is such a tiny tiny percentage of users just as criminals are a tiny percentage of our population. 99.9% of gumtree users are decent genuine people.

We do take that kind of thing very seriously and we help the police arrest such people as in the article. Will make others think twice about trying something similar

dacouch

You are not using all of the methods I mentioned

geordie_joe

dacouch wrote: »

You are not using all of the methods I mentioned

Forgive me if I am wrong, but I can only see that you mentioned two things

dacouch wrote: »

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.

Gumtree do have a system for reporting ads, it's on the top of the ad at the right hand side of the green bar.

As for leaving comments on other people's ads. Wouldn't this just allow scammers to leave comments on genuine ads saying they were scams. And leaving comments on their own ads saying they were genuine.

Widelats

I had 4 adverts on gumtree, every single response i had to them were people trying to scam me, i will only use preloved for things now or the local papers.

nexuss

I have never known so many alledged scammers in one place such as gumtree.

Altarf

nexuss wrote: »

I have never known so many alledged scammers in one place such as gumtree.

Why do you use the word "alleged"?

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.

It appears that Gumtree even think their existence provides some entertainment. So do remember to smile when you are being scammed on Gumtree.