Understanding Rental Scam on Craigslist

Project Description

To better understand Nigerian scams (especially rental scams) and associated scammers, we build an automated data collection system.
We will use Planetlab to 1) monitor rental ads posted on 20 different cities, by crawling ads at a low rate; 2) possibly post honeypot ads on craigslist. We will post honeypot ads that attract scammers but not legitimate users. Ideally, we would like to use nodes geographically proximal to the targeted 20 cities.

Network traffic generated by our project is:
1) Inbound traffic: Rental ads crawled from Craigslist websites of 20 cities
2) Outbound traffic: Crawled rental ads to our database server; and possibly ads posted to craigslist