Ellis T. Jones III, a 20 year old former football player, has been arrested in San Jose, California for allegedly using Craigslist to lure potential buyers and sellers of electronic equipment to places where he could stun them with a taser and rob them.
This is just the kind of thing that could spell trouble for online services seeking to bring people together in the meatspace (real life). Jones is charged with 13 felonies over 4 robberies in June. Craigslist says it’s a rare occurrence, and while that’s undoubtedly true - isn’t this exactly the kind of story that makes people apprehensive about meeting strangers based on online communication? According to the San Jose Mercury News story on the Jones arrest - there are at least two other people who have been arrested lately for similar but unrelated crimes.
Score another point for online systems based on reputation management and shipping purchased items in the mail. See our coverage of Rapleaf, for example.
haha, i think that is hilarious. Who is crazy enough to sit and wait to taser people. Pretty sad. The online anonymity in any social service creates a risk for things like this.
I disagree with that last line…craigslist has done nothing more than replace traditional newspaper classifieds. Such a scheme would be just as possible there, albeit not free. In addition, I’m not sure how a reputation-based system would help. This guy obviously didn’t care too much about his reputation, and everyone has a decent reputation before they screw someone over the first time. There’s still fraud on ebay. Also, shipping items through the mail isn’t always possible, or preferable.
The bottom line is, people on the internet are still strangers. Keep your guard up and use common sense. Beyond that, there’s always risk…how many people have bought and sold on craigslist before something like this happened?
I hope this comes before one of those “creative sentencing” judges, because any just punishment would involve an hourly taser jolt.
This seems more like a common sense issue than any fault on the part of craigslist:
n00bzter:Okay, I will buy the plasma TV you are selling, and I’ll bring the $1500 in cash like you asked. Say, why do you need me to meet you in the secluded parking lot out behind the abandoned millworks?”
ellis3:Uh… no reason, I just think industrial blight is cool.
n00bzter:Oh, alright. See you tomorrow
ellis3:Eeexcellent….
*bzt*
>> This is just the kind of thing that could spell trouble for online services seeking to bring people together in the meatspace (real life).
there also has to be some common sense about meeting in public places - with, like, people around and stuff.
but, yes, it’s very serious. thank goodness he was only tasering people. that said, how could this dude have gone for more than a day after his first offense without being caught? is this email/web thing still new to law enforcement terrorists? oh yeah, forgot - it is. wait - let me guess - the victims were black? yep - i suspected. being black in America is about the same as being Palestinian in the occupied territories.
Hope those people immediately called the police by either
using their cell phone - or - using a Public Phone!
Call the police immediately - DO NOT WAIT UNTIL YOU GO BACK HOME!
I don’t think you can blame Craigslist for such an incident.
People should always be weary when meeting individuals offline. A suggestion might be to meet in a public area where many people are present and/or bring a friend or two…
Or at least bring your own taser.
Sorry, this is not a laughing matter - got that all you cynical commenters?
Scammers on Craiglist and other sites are common and cases like the one here are just the extreme ones.
If you want to play safe don’t except checks and don’t wire money in other countries. Some classified websites even use services which have a built-in security system. Verfied person is one of these online background check services, which are used by some communities e.g http://www.roommateclick.com. Unfortunately not many communities support their system mainly because a background check costs money.
I don’t think you can blame craigslist either.
People should always use common sense, And in the cases of women meeting people, Always meet in a busy public well lit area.
it’s just common sense.
Whoa.. this ruins my idyllic view of online communities. Nothing bad can happen here…. baaa….baaaa…. people are nice…. baaa…baaa….
Hmmm. This means TechCrunch could just be an email pharming operation. Come to think of it my daily intake of spam HAS increased since I first posted here… Curse you, Arrington!
meatspace? shouldn’t that be meetspace?
moritz
Oh no, ban Craigslist. On a related note, Craiglisters where robbed of some jackets in Walnut Creek.
While this is a terrible crime, I can’t fault Craigslist.
Just because you interact someone online doesn’t mean you throw out common sense. Meet in a public place, bring a friend, and never bring cash!
Traditionally, classifieds made all their money from Jobs, Autos, and Real Estate, everything else was really just a drop in the bucket and a public service.
Individuals will never become power-sellers of any of these three types of offerings (how many cars do you really have to sell?) , so having a feedback system is irrelevant here.
For the rest of the site, well, maybe some people would be able to amass a huge rating, but the beauty of craigslist is that most buyers and sellers aren’t in it as a business, they are one time sellers…people forget that Craigslist is more community oriented, and is not an Ebay and so there will not be enough feedback data on most sellers to make it work.
This just in… People are using the telephone and interstate highway system to commit felonies! News at 11.
Carl - You’re right this is an extreme case, but for how long will it remain an extreme case? Maybe criminals are still busy honing their old school skills, but once they start adding these online communities to their bag of tricks then it will spread like a virus getting more creative each time.
While I do like Craiglist (CL), I think some of the blame does rest with their system which essentially forces people to meet each other, and discourages links to website affiliate programs. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen one complain about being robbed by a CL user — there are complaints posted that don’t reach the newspapers unfortunately. And the ticket section is overan by street brokers and fraduent ticket sellers — especially in Boston. Yet, CL doens’t want links to online ticket sites which have gurantees against fraud. If CL removed these restrictions, then yes, the matter of robbery incidents would be less the fault of CL rather than the buyer making a kind of choice to meet someone rather than select a totally electronic transaction option. CL staff must realize that the World has come to their not-so-little site and so one should have the alternative of not meeting someone to get what they want.
In come cases, being tazered can lead to impotence. This might be with he police grade tazers, and not the ones available to the public.
Oh, and craigslist stole … stole my respect for the human race.
Just wanted to say that we’ve been following this issue at Opinity since the first reports came out in the SF Chronicle about craigslist users being robbed.
It seems to me fairly obvious that craigslist is a secondary victim here, and that the real problem is uh criminals–like the ones who scam, steal, and phish and whom craigslist users have learned to be wary of, but this time with the incredibly alarming element of possible violence.
I’ve posted an article about the issue at http://blog.opinity.com.
Who does this guy think he is, O.J.? This is a PR nightmare for Craigslist or any other social meeting site - obviously this does not happen often but can’t we all just get along?