Et tu, Craigslist?

As someone who is self-employed, I've always been a huge fan of Craigslist. But if you've visited the site recently, you've been bombarded with warnings about the recent scams plaguing the site. And if you're looking for work, you've been bombarded with the resulting spam.

I've spent a good deal of time over the holidays planning for upcoming work, and no matter how good I think I've become at spotting a phony posting, I'm still receiving about five spam replies a week, asking for me to buy my credit report in order to 'proceed with the hiring process.'

First of all, in case anyone is wondering, I have heard that occasionally some employers want to check your credit report, but I have yet to meet anyone where that's actually happened. Secondly, any company who is going to do that is going to do it themselves, and would probably have a business account with their preferred agency to do that very thing.

But moving back to the original problem - how to eliminate applying for bogus jobs? Unless Craigslist starts to implement paying for posting for all of it's cities, the spammers are going to continue to undermine the site. But there are a few things you can do:

1. If there is an actual email address posted, do a Google search for that email. Most of the spammer emails are showing up on a site called flakelist.org which maintains a database of confirmed spammers. If the spammer is relatively new, you can still spot a fake by pulling up multiple posts in different regions by the same email. Also, just a hint: firstnamelastnamerandomnumber@gmail.com is probably not real.

2. If the posting is using the Craigslist default emailing system, try grabbing a section of text and doing a similar Google search. But, by nature, these might be harder to weed out.

3. Help a brotha' out. If you determine a posting is illegitimate, then flag the posting as spam. If everyone helps monitor the site, maybe at some point these spammers will get tired and move on.

In the meantime, good luck in that job hunt.