Phone Verification Cancels Craigslist Boycott

They have started asking posters in the skilled and real estate sections this morning!
I think they are now sharing this info with the IRS because Ebay has started sharing their info with the IRS as of January 1st. All accounts with accumulative sales over $500 duirng the year are reported.

It is not just phone verification in the “erotic” section of Craigslist that has been effected by this policy, but all the services now have been effected, e.g. Labor/Move , skilled trade, household,computer, etc..

For individuals who needed to post several ads per day to compete with the incredible number of ads that are posted for labor and household services offered, and who were not spammers, this policy is a disaster. This policy not only cuts out the honest individual workers ability to compete, the same workers who get part time work from their ads, but it allows the commercial spammers to control the board using deceptive methods to bypass the verification system, e.g. getting multiple yahoo accounts and using friends home phone numbers to retrieve the verification code number. All in all this phone verification system has “Nothing” to do with abuses in the “erotic” section, or it would have been dealt with in the erotic section, that was an excuse to implement the phone verification in additional sections of craigslist to bolster the demand for paid advertising and to destroy the privacy of the individual. There could have been an easy method to halt the abuses in the erotic section simply by adding additional rules that would have resulted in the elimination of that section. However it became a convenient opportunity to exploit.