Craigslist Blame Games: Assigning Responsibility for Online Scams

• In Event: Scams, Frauds, and Fakes

Abstract

In this paper, I examine perceptions of fraud and scams on craigslist. How do ordinary users conceptualize fraud and deceptions? How is responsibility distributed among the many stakeholders connected to online exchange? To develop an analysis of craigslist and fraud, I analyze posts from craigslist's help forum, using a data scrape for posts related to terms like “fraud,” “scam,” “con” and their variants. craigslist users largely understood fraud as a problem of failed regulation, holding different parties responsible for that failure, depending on their view of which underlying system required broader regulatory measures. Some blamed the platform for its inability to regulate an unruly internet, casting fraud as a technical problem of content moderation. Others faulted users for lacking common sense in economic transactions, framing fraud as a behavioral problem of market regulation. Several accused law enforcement of incompetence in punishing scammers, seeing fraud as a criminal problem of legal regulation. I read these narratives as folk theories (Eslami et al., 2016) that reveal broader power dynamics between users, platforms and external bodies such as law enforcement. The paper concludes with design implications and directions for future research.

Author

• jessa lingel, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication