Craigslist Not What It Used to Be For Roommate Finding

We just had to do the roommate search thing again since our roommate for the past year decided to move to Texas with her boyfriend. We did the usual thing of posting our ad on Craigslist. I know the rental market is down, but we weren't expecting to get only a handful of responses. Most of the responses we got off of CL ended up being spammers operating scams from overseas. They were doing an updated version of the accidental overpayment scam. To any of you who aren't familiar with this scam and you're looking for a roommate, just get extremely suspicious if someone seems too eager to send you a deposit right away to secure the room and if you do get a check that's for far more than the expected amount, don't cash it.

So.... back to the topic. We got antsy after two weeks of not getting responses so we tried Rent.com and Roommates.com. We tried these two sites previously when we were looking a year and a half ago and it felt like the online dating scene when it first appeared. There was nobody there.

To make a long story short, it was different this time. We found a perfect roommate within a few days on Rent.com and didn't get our arses spammed off by posting to there.

Ever since Craigslist got big, I've always said that it's the old USENET for the rest of us. If you're not familiar with USENET, it's essentially a massive "seemingly unified" bulletin board system that spans across the entire Internet and it was extremely popular in the 90's for all the reasons why Craigslist is popular today. It got choked to death by spammers because there was no practical way to prevent people from posting anything they wanted.

I thought Craigslist would be protected from that since it put up some barriers to posting that made it harder to spam, but it appears like the spammers are simply reverse spamming people posting ads now.