Home trashed after cruel Craigslist hoax
 

This is the kind of thing that will ruin the internet for us all.

Yet another bad apple makes its presence known in the wretched barrel o' monkeys over at craigslist.

Since the internet demonstrates that it cannot regulate itself, government will eventually step-in to restore necessary order, no doubt, limiting our freedoms in the process.


Home trashed after cruel Craigslist hoax

09:39 AM PDT on Thursday, April 5, 2007
By TRICIA MANNING-SMITH / KING 5 News



Tacoma home trashed, homeowner devastated

TACOMA, Wash. - Someone with cruel intentions placed a fake ad on Craigslist, inviting people to take whatever they wanted for free from a Tacoma home.**

Homeowner Laurie Raye says there's little left now of the house. The outside of the home is trashed, the inside is nearly gutted and covered in graffiti. Raye says she is devastated.*

"I was attached to this home because it used to be my mom's," says Raye. *

KING
The homeowner says from the light fixtures to the hot water heater, everything is gone - including the kitchen sink.

Raye recently evicted the tenant and cleaned out the rental, but she would soon be the one taken to the cleaners.* A phone caller alerted Raye to the destruction.* She walked through her garbage strewn front yard to find her house dismantled.*

"Including the front door," said Raye.* "This used to be a very nice vinyl window here."*

From the light fixtures to the hot water heater, everything is gone - including the kitchen sink.*

Her neighbors later reported seeing strangers hauling stuff away from her home, seemingly looking for salvage material.**

The "ad" was posted on Craigslist last weekend.*

"In the ad, it said come and take what you want. Everything is free," said Raye. "Please help yourself to anything on the property."*

An off-duty Tacoma police officer noticed the Craigslist ad last week, inviting people to enter the unlocked house and take whatever they wanted.* Later, that same officer noticed the ad was flagged and canceled after a reported burglary at the house.*

"We've had a lot of scams off of Craigslist," said Detective Gretchen Ellis, Tacoma Police Department. "We've had prostitution things happen, rental scams, fraudulent activity. In this case, it appeared the items were going to be given away, but they were not."*

"This can happen to anybody, but look what happened to me," said Raye. *

Raye believes the unknown person who posted the ad carries a personal grudge against her, but that person also conned unsuspecting people into taking part.*

"The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me," said Raye.*

When Raye contacted Craigslist, she received an email back saying they can't release information about who posted the ad without a subpoena or search warrant.**

KING 5 was unable to get anyone from Craigslist to personally respond to this story, but the web site has a long list of rules that clearly prohibit people from posting material that is illegal, harmful, threatening or harassing.

http://www.king5.com/localnews/stori....34e92f1d.html

That is awful. That really really upsets me. :(

Maybe the landlady person that had her property destroyed is a real bitch.

It still doesn't make this the right thing to do. And, just like I wrote, this is another mark against the inherency argument to keep the internet, for the most part, unregulated.

... what kind of person would do something like that to someone else?

Apparently the tenants got kicked-out by the landlady and then either them, or some online friends proceeded to arrange the criminal hoax on craigslist as retribution. Their actions are reprehensible despite some difficult-to-pin-down degree of "underdog" cutesiness.

That is truly fucked up. My heart goes out to the victim of this.

Are you guys landlords?

Haha

I guess you're just good people.

I've had some real bastard landlords in the past, and although I would never think of doing something like this to someone.....my wife might.

it's just cruel and pointless. no matter what they did to you before, they sure won't treat you any better after doing this.

I've been the victim of a burglary, so know what it's like to have shit ripped off by wankers.

whether she was a bitch or not it's still her house and provided she didn't break the conditions of the contract it's fair game for her to get the tenants to leave, after all living in a house is a business relationship, not a personal one. if the landlord is a bitch or bastard you can always find a new place to live.

well-stated

although I certainly don't condone this, I'm sure that that wasn't the intention.

And I thought Tacoma was a nice place, too.

When I was in Seattle my hotel was across the street from KING5 studios and it took me a few days to work out that K.I.N.G could be read as the word 'king'. I was like, "wow, right next to Kay Eye En Gee studios!".

The internet is the perfect environment for criminals. They're anonymous, difficult to trace and can operate from virtually every corner of the globe. It's getting worse by the day. I'm afraid that most governments won't be able to do a damn thing about it.


Visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet.

This place can be very nasty sometimes.

So the cops or the victims get the subpoena, track down the culprits, and those guys go to jail. Seems they'll end up the real losers in all this.

just to state that it sure won't help :D

This is awful, the internet should be destroyed!!!!

Don't be rash. Though this is terrible, it's an isolated incident. People are going to be cunts on the internet just like they're going to be cunts anywhere else.

yeh i was indeed joking.
heartless? nay!
calous? nay!
but i genuinly couldn't care less about the woman and her house, except for an immature 'LOL she got PWNED! WtF will she live in now!?!?'

I mean, it doesn't effect me in the slightest. for all i know, atarii wrote the original article. and I doubt this could lead to state intervention and moderation of the internet, because it's rare that anything on the internet has serious consequences in real life.