Return of “Craigslist bots”

Posting on the Craigslist personals sections is kind of like sticking your hand into your refrigerator vegetable drawer, blindfolded.  You might pull out something wonderful, or you might grab the cucumber you left in there two months ago and forgot about.  Eewww.  (And I’m just talking posting and the replies you get, not what actually shows up at your door!)

The most notorious are the Craigslist bots, automated replies that get past the CAPTCHA mechanism to send you curiously phrased replies which are just tantalizing enough to maybe be real.  I’ve posted about this before once, and again.

Here is the latest variation I’ve received, within 15 minutes of each other (I’ve zapped the address domain names so spiders hopefully won’t pick them up):

From: Vance Hale

Well let's get this show going! I reckon I should give you my stats, I'm 6'1in, 180; brown/green. I'm looking for normal to small dicks. Later, man

And then this one:

From: Cory Ford

God, some of the posts are hilarious. Yours was great, tho. So I suppose I should give my stats, like 6'1", 177 brown/blue. Any age difference is no object for me. Meshing well is about all that does. Chk U L8r.

How to spot a bot?  Well, a couple of the old methods aren’t present here: a woman’s name attached to a post going to a guy, or directing you to a site to verify that you are real.

The telltale here, of course, was the similar structure: greeting, I should give my stats, stats for someone desirably tall and desirably slender, note about what I want, closing.  In particular, though, no reference to what my post was about, no racial information, and nothing that my post requested is present (like a pic).

You’ll note that the “Cory Ford” email address carries a woman’s name, though, and the “Vance Hale” one may as well (“willa”), but the email address is going to be hidden in favor of just the reply name in most modern programs.  I can’t for the life of my figure out who would program bots to be smart enough to attach a male name on an m4m post but still use a female email address.  (But that’s how spammers and virus writers get caught: they do something stupid, leave some clue.)