Craigslist Thieves Caught

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

An interesting end to the Craigslist hoax story over the weekend that left an Oregon man minus his stuff: A couple named Brandon and Amber Herbert apparently placed the ad as a cover to a planned theft of two horse saddles. They placed the ad on Craigslist, which said that all the belongings were free for the taking at an abandoned house. They then joined in the mob that showed up for the goods.

Their IP address was tracked by police through information supplied by Craigslist.

It’s funny how few people understand how easy it is to track activity via IP address. For example, the startup CEOs who leave comments here under their real name, and then suddenly go trolling under an anonymous name, all under the same IP.

Photo via The Raw Feed.

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