Craigslist – track down and crush competitor

The details are particular to this niche, but the basics can be used anywhere… this wouldn’t scale so easily for mass Craigslist spammers, but it should be perfect for local businesses/posters.

I post ads for a car dealer in 8 different Craigslist cities in the state. In one city, my ads kept getting flagged off, and my accounts were being put on hold from it.

I suspected it was a local dealer in that town doing it..

So here’s what I did:

1) I got a cheap .info domain that was car related, and set up a hosting account for (I have a resellers acount).

2) I uploaded pictures of various cars to it. let’s say I named them “car1.jpg”, “car2.jpg”, etc

3) I created a list in excel of dealers I suspected were flagging me. I put their name in column A. In column B, I matched them up with a car pic I had uploaded to my server. 1 dealer per car ONLY.

3) I went ot craigslist, and sent an email to each dealer I had listed on my spreadsheet. The email was a fake lead. during the ensueing email correspondence (after they replied to my fake lead), I eventually asked them something like “do you have something sort of like this”, and then I incldued a link to the car image I had matched them up with. In some cases, I had to go to their website to initiate the email, as they had posted their Craigslist ads anon.

** at this point, the dealer pulls up the image in their browser to see what you are talking about.. and BAM – their IP is now logged into our web servers log, along with the picture they requested **

4) I then simply went through the log file on my server, seeing which IP address requested which picture. Remember, only 1 dealer was given the link per image, so no one else but that dealer would have requested it. I copy this IP address down in a 3rd column of the spread sheet, next to the appropriate image. For example, if my log file show’s IP “1.2.3.4″ requested image “car1.jpg”, I find ‘car1′ on my spreadsheet, and then put ’1.2.3.4′ next to it column C.

** I now have a list of IP’s for each dealership/competitor **.

Now, the next parts could be streamlined and made a lot better, but I was too lazy to bother

I added an image tag to each new ad I posted to Craigslist, that pointed to a webserver of mine (NOT the same domain I used earleir).

I gave the image a unique name in each ad (this is our tracking image). This image did not exist – it simply comes up as a broken image if you try to pull it up in a browser (liek I said – lazy). I use a php and a DB to generate the html for my ads, so I simply added a another table to track each ad with a unique ID, and used that ID as the image’s name in the ad when I generated it.

I went ahead and posted my ads…

everytime someone looked at an ad, their IP was logged in my webserver’s logs requesting that tracking image I had inserted into the add.

when one of my ads got flagged, I made note of the tracking image I had assigned to that particular ad.

I then searched my web servers log (the server that the tracking images pointed to). I searched to see if any of the dealers IPs from my list showed up, and what ads they had looked at.

Sure enough, I found the culprit

In my case, this guy not only had the nerve to flag my ads for posting in “his” city’s craigslist, he had the balls to turn around and start posting ads in MY city and others! ie, doing the very thing that he was punishing me for.