It is no secret that scammers, fraudsters, and criminals target online classified sites. In fact, Security Week, an online publication for all internet and online security news, reported that in 2010’s second quarter, online classifieds made up 6.6% of all online phishing attacks and that this number is on the rise.

“What is phishing?” Phishing is any attempt to get at sensitive information like usernames, passwords, credit card details, and so forth, through misdirection, such a posing a fake website as the legitimate one. The goal is to fool you, often into willingly providing private information and/or funds, and take advantage of weaknesses in online security. Another form of online dishonesty that I have seen is harassment. Fake ads are put up on the site with a target’s phone number; the outcome, of course, being that this individual is overwhelmed by phone calls and in some cases, house visits, by eager buyers for the fake items that were posted.

Recently, Craigslist has come under fire being accused by Oodle of letting crime run rampant on its website. The Business website, FastCompany, reported on this, releasing an article referring to Craigslist as a”Cesspool of Crime.”

Not only do phishers and other scammers target the people who use Craiglist like they do on Used.ca, but alarmingly there have been a number of reports where people have become victims of violent crimes following their interactions with the site. While it is reported that criminal transactions over Craigslist are an extreme minimum when coupled with successful and legitimate interactions, the nature and plain existence of these crimes has hurt Craigslist’s reputation, and even spawned the creation of crime-watch websites.

What are we doing differently? What are we doing to help protect you and your family here at Used.ca? For starters, we feel it is important to keep you informed, which is why we are writing this blog post, amongst others. For example, Guide to Safely Buying on Used.ca; This Hockey Ticket Scam; or This Email Scam.

After we have armed you with the know-how to help protect yourself, the second line of defense is the automatic removal of ads by the website. This system removes all the questionable ads, from those that don’t quite check out to those posted by blacklisted scammers. In 2010, 2.6% of all ads posted across all of our websites were weeded out by this automatic check-and-balance system. Next, we have a team of moderators that work their bums off to keep spam, fraud, and crime off of our sites and respond to your questions, concerns, and reports of those problem ads. Across all 43 sites in Canada, our moderators removed 6.12% of the 2,779,209 ads posted in 2010.

We are able to keep the number of ads removed low and the level of security to you high, largely because of the help you provide us. By clicking on that “Report Ad” button for ads that you know to be illegitimate, we are able to get rid of the rest of those bad ads that sneak through.  Users can also give us a hand in pointing out scams and unsavory posts on our sites by emailing anything suspicious to feedback@used.ca.