Taking a page from the Karen Smith playbook (her breasts can tell when it’s raining!), a modern philanthropist is offering one hell of a service to lucky ladies in New York: free psychic breast readings. 

Not palm readings. Breast readings.

The Craigslist post originally appeared a week ago, under the men-seeking-women personals section. It’s titled “Enjoy the experience of a Psychic Breast-reading - 48 ( surprisingly accurate).” 

Perhaps with the change of season you are wondering what will stand out for you in the days ahead. Luckily, I have found a revealing way to probe into and behold such mysteries. 

Now I'm not a great mind reader, and I can't interpret your palm, read a Tarot card layout, or fathom what leaves left in a teacup want to say. However, I am able to "read" a woman's breasts, and -- by delving into this significant territory -- gain insight into your Happiness, Success and even Romance. 

If this sounds like magic to you, that's how it feels to me!

I found this skill a number of years ago, merely by good luck. Out of the blue, I remarked to a partially clad companion, "Did you know I can read your breasts?" "You can?" she responded, "ok -- go ahead." So I did, and thereby began a journey of increasing insight into these too often under-explored areas which contain such major potential. Of course, it's natural to be skeptical -- as I was at first -- but it's wound up as an authentic and at the same time definitely enjoyable experience. 

A full reading -- which is also by the way free -- goes beyond the visual, and uses various elements and styles of touch. It may take 90 minutes or more, although a briefer "speed-reading" can also be somewhat worthwhile. 

Here are a few actual testimonials: 

-- "Wonderful attention and touch." 

-- "That was extraordinary!" 

-- "A very relaxing, sensual time." 

-- "I had a very enjoyable time on many levels. It was really lovely." 

Intrigued, I reached out with a few questions—things like how he discovered his unique talent, the methodology, and whether he’s an equal-opportunity masseur, or if his talents were only limited to women. This is the response I received from the man who identified himself only as “D.”

I only read women's breasts.

So if you qualify I will be happy to do yours.

If you will be doing this it is better not to explain the reading aspects ahead of time. I can answer some other questions ahead of time.

I discovered this over 20 years ago while still in my 20s. I have probably done over 50 readings. D.

Well then. 

Skeptics might say that given the gender exclusivity, this man is nothing more than a cheap pervert. Then again, he’s asking nothing in return, and it’s a generous offer: well over an hour of fondling and foreseeing. Who knows what secrets of your future you might unlock if you let a solid motorboat sneak into your session?

I’m more than 3,000 miles away from his stomping grounds, and when I told him I was a reporter, I received no response back. (He must be busy, right?) An intrepid soul with a rack to match should get in there quickly—while D is still sharing his handiwork for free.

Photo via indraw/Flickr

Author, opera singer, and polyglot Gabriel Wyner had long known that learning language is a memory game heavily dependent on remembering pronunciations, especially of those words that the untrained ear can’t differentiate.

But it wasn’t until the editor of his forthcoming how-to book, Fluent Forever, asked how such nuances can be learned quickly that he began to think about a game-changing approach to the problem—and what he came up with looks promising indeed.

“I had recently read a series of studies that came out of Carnegie Mellon about teaching Japanese adults to hear the difference between ‘Rock’ and ‘Lock’—but that no one had used that research to make a practical tool,” Wyner told the Daily Dot via email. “So I decided to make one on my own.”

The result is “Fluent Forever: Foreign Language Pronunciation Trainers,” a software project that easily surpassed 500 percent funding on Kickstarter in just three weeks.

Pitched as a series of apps—one for each language, with 12 on the docket so far and a 13th promised if backers hit the $60,000 stretch goal—the trainers will be somewhat game-like. Operating from a list of hundreds of almost-identical word pairs, they’ll play the pronunciation of a random term aloud, prompting the user to select which of the two similar sounds they heard. The “immediate feedback as to whether you were right,” Wyner said, is the key to wiring a brain for speech in a non-native tongue, and a critical first step toward total fluency.

Wyner tested the idea on himself.

“I got a Hungarian native speaker to make recordings of all the gnarly sounds in that language,” he said, and then “stuck them into Anki,” a free, open-source flashcard application that runs on a variety of operating systems and will serve as the platform for future trainers.

“Ten days later, I could hear and recognize everything. I had never encountered anything that worked that fast or that well.”

Especially for a guy who had "spent seven years totally failing to learn Hebrew" and struggled with traditional techniques in developing languages needed for opera performance, it was a revelation—one he wanted to share.

Now it appears he’s got more than enough money to do so, and eight months before the book that outlines his methods hits shelves. The final and perhaps trickiest ingredient to procure is a suitable voice actor for each app. Wyner has turned to Craigslist and the diverse city of Los Angeles for assistance on that front. Putting up ads for “bilinguals with pristine accents in both English and another language,” he found “a ton.” And with more than 1,000 people now in his Kickstarter network, he’s confident he’ll find a perfect match for each pronunciation guide.

If for nothing else, Wyner can put these tools to his own use. Already proficient in Italian, German, French, and Russian, to name a daunting few, he’s hardly content to stop accumulating new grammars and vocabularies. “I'm looking forward to Japanese next year,” he said, the way most of us would talk about a birthday or vacation. Maybe he’s onto something here?

Photo by Simon James/Flickr 

It was love at first slight dampness.

Everybody enters the new year with a lasting few regrets about the old, but, clearly sick of wondering what might have been, a young woman of Bloomington, Indiana, has resolved to let no truth go unsaid and no potential soul mate run off into the night—whether he needs a change of pants or not.

Why even try to do this missed connection justice? It’s the most compelling romance of our time, as well as an early contender for the best Craigslist post of 2014. If we can’t get these two kids back together, there’s no hope for the rest of us.

You - 5'8 scruffy, glasses, wearing a blue hoodie outside the Vid and I asked you for a lighter. You lit my cigarette and we talked about our wishes for the new year. We heard the countdown starting and decided to stay outside. I started to cry and you kissed me, and then we started to make out. After a minute I felt something warm and realised that you pissed yourself. I pushed you away and that's when you ran but I wish you had stayed. You peed on me but it's OK! I just want to know who you are! Please reply and when you do tell me why I started crying so I know it's you - if you remember.

The loneliness, the cigarettes, the countdown outside in the cold, the crying, the kissing, the pissing—it has all the elements of a blockbuster rom-com starring Jessica Biel and Topher Grace, don’t you think? What a great story to tell their kids someday.

Photo by Kai Marius-Pederson/Flickr

It may be the brightest political move this year or the the riskiest. Either way, congressional hopeful David Green is taking a chance on Craigslist.

The candidate for Illinois’s 13th Congressional District has made a posting on the classifieds site looking for a campaign manager “with the skills and ability and persistence to make contacts with student groups in all of these locations, as well as progressives, minorities, and labor unions.” The gig runs through March and pays $300 week for 20 hours of work.

Green is up against Madison County Chief Judge Ann Callis and George Gollin for the spot currently held by Republican Rodney Davis of Taylorville. On the Republican side, Green faces competition from “attorney Erika Harold, a former Miss America from Urbana, and Michael Firsching, a veterinarian from Moro, near Edwardsville,” NWI reported.

Green is a social policy analyst at the University of Illinois' Center for Prevention Research and Development.

H/T NWI | Photo by VinothChandar/Flickr

We are in a magical time, my friends. Nope, not the New Year. And I’m not talking about the holiday hangover that stretches into January. I’m referring to the Consumer Electronics Showcase, or CES, the week-long Vegas conference that spotlights all the tech you will want to buy, cannot have, or which will remain in prototype from here to eternity.

In all honesty, as a CES veteran (three years straight, kiddos) there are a great many awe-inspiring things to see and try—things that make me incredibly proud and amazed to be a fellow human to the creators behind them.

But don’t be fooled by the wearable tech products, the ever-tinier full frame cameras, the advances in healthcare technology. There’s also a sleazy, sticky underbelly to CES, which doesn’t take very many steps to conceal itself. A few things make CES naturally disposed to a certain lusty atmosphere:

1) It’s in Las Vegas. Need I say more?

2) It just so happens to coincide with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. The events overlap, and you can bet that the tech-obsessed throngs start getting bored of the quad-core CPU/GPU/Gorilla Glass talk and wander next door because, you know, naked people.

3) Booth Babes. Scantily clad ladies that are used as props by tech companies at their floor booths. Sometimes these women (and to a lesser extent, men) are repackaged as brand reps, who are slicked out in slightly sexier business wear and given cue cards. It’s fairly demeaning to everyone at the show, not just women, but that’s an argument for another time.

(Sidenote: or is it? I was interviewed by the BBC about this at CES 2012, and most of the comments I received for it were about how I was a hypocrite for “being cute” and unappreciative of the conference’s confusing messages about women in the industry. Fantastic.)

All of these makes me only slightly surprised at the surplus of CES-specific sexy requests lighting up Craigslist. The Las Vegas personals section reads like an adulterous, lascivious menu for post-show… uh, interaction. Because after a day of picking up more flash drives, business cards, and free iPhone cases than you’ll ever be able to use, all you really want to do is hit the strip with some young thing, amirite?

Personally, I just worked until 10pm and then smoked cigars with my coworkers while we looked for bars that least resembled nightclubs, but a quick perusal of the Las Vegas Craigslist suggests I was in the minority. These handful deserve awards for sexifying CES. 

[Warning: Don't go clicking on these ads on your own unless you want to see copious amounts of penises.]

(Thank God he's not a computer nerd, though.)

If you are like me and live in a city where gridlock has replaced most new-age religions as your state of being, even ridiculous gas prices can make you yearn for an SUV—you may not be moving, but at least you’re not stuck staring at the dirty back windshield of the Altima in front of you. One entrepreneurial Craigslist user is hoping to capitalize on exactly this, by offering up his 2011 Jeep Cherokee. The cost? A week with your wife.

As Jalopnik first reported, a Houston man with a loose grip on the English language offers a unique proposition:

I have a 4wd Jeep Cherokee. Its is dully loaded and has a which attached to front ranch hand bumper and grill gaurd. It is on a 4 in suspension lift and a 6 inch body lift has 35 mud grip tires(1200) witch has only been on it for two months. The truck only has 48,000 miles on it. i am looking to trade it but I looking for certain things only. I don't need it but its paid for so O don't have to sell it. Now here is what I am looking for. A lady( preferable married to how wants the jeep) she mist be 18 to 50 and fit. I give you the jeep and you leave your wife with me for a week. When you come pick her up she have the signed title to the jeep. So if interested send me several photo of the wife and I get right back to you. The photo need to be nude after all she will be for a week.

Given the request for a nude photo, your wife will ostensibly be providing emotional support and tender love and care, perhaps just in an uncomfortably warm climate.

As Jalopnik points out, the cost of a 2011 Jeep Cherokee is around $20,000. The original poster doesn’t specify whether you get to keep the car permanently, or just for the week as collateral to reclaim your spouse, so depending on how much you dislike your wife, this might be a very fair trade.

Image via Aidan/Flickr

The annual Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference is a bit like the Real World of academia. The weekend-long conference, which takes place in Chicago this weekend, is what happens when highfalutin professors stop being polite and start getting real. 

And by “getting real,” we mean pounding shooters, discussing Marcuse’s theory of technological rationality, and getting laid. So like the actual Real World, except without that, um, second part. 

Don’t be fooled by events with dry, academic titles like “The Vicissitudes of the Negative in 19th-Century German Humor”: The MLA convention has a long, storied hookup culture.

But one eager conference attendee didn’t want to leave it to chance. Instead, he posted a Casual Encounters ad on Craigslist, complete with an insanely detailed description of his MLA interview fantasy. 

Identifying himself as an assistant research professor—36 years old, “fairly fit,” and married but not monogamous—the author opens with the following: 

MLA interviews, fraught with tension, can also be thick with eroticism. As a veteran of many (and a current job candidate), I'd like to indulge in a little stress-relief fantasy role-play at this year's conference.

I propose to play interviewee to your interviewer:

I will arrive at your MLA hotel room, in my interview suit, ready to discuss my research, my place in my field, my theoretical approaches, my teaching methods, etc.

You ask me the appropriate questions and listen, interrupt, challenge, acting as a typical faculty member of a hiring committee. (You explain that your colleagues are respectively ill in bed and unable to attend because of personal obligations but, yes, you are authorized to advance my candidacy.) 

Over the course of the interview we begin to cast flirtatious sidelong glances, adopt inviting body language and inch toward one other. At the right moment one of us makes the bold move of an innocent touch on the shoulder, followed by leaning in for a kiss. We both know it's wrong, but we're too titillated to stop.

The final outcome is something we can discuss in advance, or figure out on the fly.

Ever the gentleman, he continues by conceding that he is “amenable to flipping the script”: 

You arrive at my MLA hotel room, in your interview wear, ready to discuss your research, your place in your field, your theoretical approaches, your teaching methods, etc.

I ask you the appropriate questions and listen, interrupt, challenge, acting as a typical faculty member of a hiring committee. (I explain that my colleagues are respectively ill in bed and unable to attend because of personal obligations but, yes, I am authorized to advance your candidacy.) 

The author then goes on to describe himself and his ideal partner, saying that while he’s “open to all sorts of [female] candidates … an actual interviewee is my hope.” 

Though he fails to specify his field of study, judging by the incorrect usage of comma splices and semicolons, it most likely ain’t English. 

About me: I am 36, fairly fit and usually thought of as attractive, in a committed relationship at home but (by agreement) not beholden to monogamy when on the road, especially at conferences. I'm an assistant professor at a research university with a real degree of success in my field. I prioritize reading and responding to my sexual partners' verbal and physical signals; I am not insistent or pushy. I delight in new sexual experiences.

I am open to all sorts of (female) candidates to partner with here; no particular age or appearance in mind, though an actual interviewee is my hope. Obviously, discretion will be of utmost importance to us both. Exchanging photos would be best, but I am flexible regarding process.

So get in line, ladies. Adjuncts, non-tenure-track faculty members, and other assorted plebes need not apply. 

H/T Craigslist | Photo via World Relief Spokane/Flickr

There's a scene in the new Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis where our frumpy folk hero Llewyn finds himself stranded on the side of a highway with his guitar and cat. Certain he won’t be able to hitch a ride if he brings along his fuzzy, marmalade companion, Davis makes a tough call: He leaves the cat behind to face an uncertain, wintery doom in a broken-down car with a heroin-addled jazz aficionado.

For many, the scene was too much. If there was ever any hope for redemption of the already profoundly unlovable folk singer, it was lost. Who, after all, would do such an unthinkable thing to a poor cat? Especially in the dead of winter.

As it turns out, Llewyn's behavior might not be so uncommon as we’d hoped. As Jezebel reported, someone in the Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn who moved out of their apartment this week jettisoned their cat in the building’s lobby, according to a Craigslist post that went up Tuesday night.

“Someone in my community moved out right before the blizzard and just left their cat,” the post read.

“Predictably, management evicted the cat and she's just been sitting out in the patio area, freezing, and waiting for her owners to come home.

She is the sweetest cat in the world. I have seriously never encountered such an affectionate animal. Unfortunately, however, I am not allowed to have a pet by conditions of my lease.”

As a parting gift, the owner left two small cans of cat food. For those of you not following the cosmic scandal sweeping the North East known as the polar vortex, it was a particularly unfortunate week for a cat to be left outside: Nighttime temperatures have fallen into the single digits. Luckily, the cat was adopted today, according to Jezebel.

Photo via Craigslist

Meet Jerry. 

Jerry’s a normal-looking dude. Jerry also had a TV he didn’t need anymore. So, like you do, he sold it on Craigslist.

His friends came up with a pretty funny idea: Why not shave your head and dress up like Walter White so you freak out the person who buys it? Ha ha, that’d be a surprise.

Except Jerry did them one better. He shaved everything except the sides of his head, so he looked like a baby-faced 40-year-old with male-pattern baldness. He even grew out his mustache a little, too.

And then he put on this outfit:

And when the buyer contacted him for a photo, he sent over a little more than just the TV.

Amazingly, it seems to have worked. The buyer must have really, really needed a TV.

His friend, using the screenname mustacheenvy, posted the whole saga to Reddit. “My friend decided to sell his TV on Craigslist and this is what happened,” he wrote. But several mysteries remain: Did the sale go through? Did Jerry keep his amazing new haircut?

Also, because everything on the Internet is a hoax, could this be fake? Easily. No doubt. The “buyer” could be the friend who posted Jerry on Reddit. I asked mustacheenvy for the original ad and the rest of the story.

Naked Craigslist sales are a fine art. Jerry’s might be the funniest one I’ve ever seen. This weird dude with a keyboard comes close, though.

Photos via Reddit/Imgur

One Baltimore resident, snowed in during this latest storm to hit the East Coast, now had a problem many have faced before. After having a few drinks too many, she felt a desperate longing for Taco Bell. And walking there would’ve been a two-mile round trip in the snow.

With six words, she quickly summed up how we were feeling about the weather, proving once again the storm will bring out the best and worst of us: “Guys it’s snowing like a bitch outside.”

And so begins this Craigslist ad, which might be an another early contender for best listing of the year.

Guys it’s snowing like a bitch outside, I’ve had a few drinks too many, and my sh*tty little hybrid douchemobile can’t possibly make it to the neighborhood Taco Bell in this weather. I need someone with a 4 wheel drive vehicle to come pick my drunk ass up, take me to the Taco Bell drive-thru, and drive me back home. Then we can hang out and play video games if you’re not a rapist. This is maybe 2 miles round trip. I’ll pay in tacos. or chalupas. whatever. Seriously my desire for tacos right now is totally unmanageable, so I’d probably even buy you a 7 layer burrito if you asked nicely.

So the status of this person’s massive craving stayed unknown until the ad made the front page of Reddit and the Craigslist ad poster made an appearance. “That drunk, snowed-in taco muncher is me,” she wrote.

The poster was nursing a “taco baby” after sobering up enough to make the drive, and while the car got stuck in the snow, Taco Bell was finally obtained.

“I had a nacho loco taco, a crunchy taco, a soft taco, a chalupa, and some Cinnabon bites that tasted like straight up assholes,” squirrelsoup wrote. 

And no, squirrelsoup wasn’t high.

If this isn’t a great argument for Taco Bell to start delivering, I don’t know what is.

Photo via Mike Baird/Flickr

Since the adult film industry switched from VHS to DVD to online streaming services, longtime consumers have been trying to figure out what to do with their boxes o’ porn. Should they be donated to charity? Should they be left to our grandkids? Should the DVD boxes be gathered and used to build a giant porn fort in the basement, so the kids can play in it on rainy days? Or should they be pawned off on a classifieds website to the highest bidder, for an unspecified, non-monetary sum? 

According to this Craigslist listing, one intrepid soul in Houston decided to go down the latter route, placing an ad for a staggering 3,000 porn DVDs in the “barter” section:

Adult DVD's in original packaging (houston tx)

I have an assorted lot of adult DVD's in my warehouse. These are the 6 hour long versions without story lines. I have no use for them, but thought I would see what trade offers are out there. They come 100 in a case and I have 30 cases.

I will consider any trade offers for a case or more. If you are in the service industry I will also consider, but tell me what it is you do in the first email.

I am open to nearly any trade offers with the exception of live animals. Please email what you have and I will give it the proper consideration. 

I am NOT interested in cash sales. Trade offers only please. If your first email does not have a trade offer it might be ignored as spam.

Be willing to meet downtown near the GRB convention center for any swaps.

(If there were ever any question that adult DVD sales are currently in the toilet … well, there no longer is.)

Honestly, this ad is like a prompt for a short story in a creative writing class: It just raises so many more questions than it answers. For starters, how does one acquire enough adult DVDs to fill a warehouse? What kind of job must this person have to be able to afford 3,000 adult DVDs and the monthly rent required to store them in said warehouse? And why is this person so much more emphatic about “NOT” accepting cash offers than he is about the “no live animals” provision? The wording on the listing leads me to believe there’s some wiggle room in this regard. And why is there no such provision for live humans? Is this some sort of extremely wealthy, high-functioning, debauched sociopath looking to trade porn DVDs for human slaves, so he can hunt them for sport? I’m thinking we’re either dealing with a) a high-ranking organized crime official or b) Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

According to a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, the answer is neither: Though he’s wary about his name being published in the press, the vendor in question is a former video store owner looking to unload some of his XXX-rated stock. While he won’t specify what genre the films are in, he says he’s received a bunch of wacky offers from prospective buyers, including a pet zebra and a Patriot Missile nose cone. “As it is plastic I am sure it is some kind of model or kit,” rather than part of some sort of dangerous explosive device, he writes.

This is officially the weirdest thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. 

H/T Houston Chronicle | Photo via ephidryn/Flickr

A judge has ruled that a Kansas man who answered a lesbian couple’s Craigslist ad seeking a sperm donation is responsible for paying child support for the baby he helped conceive, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports.

Earlier this week, District Court Judge Mary Mattivi ruled that, despite William Marotta having signed a contract with the couple stating he was under no obligation to support the child financially over the course of its lifetime, he is the child’s legal father. As a result, he would be required to pay child support. The issue, according to Judge Mattivi, was that the parties involved failed to go through all of the necessary steps required for a legal sperm donation—specifically, using a licensed physician for the artificial insemination procedure.

“Kansas law is clear that a ‛donor of semen provided to a licensed physician for use in artificial insemination of a woman other than the donor’s wife is treated in law as if he were not the birth father of a child thereby conceived, unless agreed to in writing by the donor and the woman,’” Mattivi wrote. “In this case, quite simply, the parties failed to conform to the statutory requirements of the Kansas Parentage Act in not enlisting a licensed physician at some point in the artificial insemination process, and the parties’ self-designation of (Marotta) as a sperm donor is insufficient to relieve (Marotta) of parental rights and responsibilities.”

Four years ago, Angela Bauer and her partner Jennifer Schreiner wrote a Craigslist ad that read: “We are foster and adoptive parents, and now we desire to share a pregnancy and birth together.”

The couple offered to pay a $50 fee for the donation, but Marotta waived it, feeling he was doing a good deed.

Bauer and Schreiner split up in 2010, and Schreiner applied for welfare benefits two years later, after health issues stopped Bauer from being able to work. The state of Kansas denied the welfare claim and ordered Scheiner to disclose the identity of the father, so he could begin paying child support. Since Kansas does not recognize same-sex marriages, the couple had to list Schreiner as the mother on the birth certificate, while not including Bauer. The couple have seven other children, mostly from adoption, and they’ve been forced to handle all of the legal documents in a similar manner.

As the Associated Press reports, in a court filing earlier this week, the Kansas Department of Children and Families charged that the contract intended to absolve Marotta of all parental responsibility, ‟[overlooks] the well-established law in this state that a person cannot contract away his or her obligations to support their child."

Both Bauer and Schreiner have opposed the state’s attempts to require Marotta to pay child support. “This was a wonderful opportunity with a guy with an admirable, giving character who wanted nothing more than to help us have a child,” Bauer told the Capital Journal. “I feel like the state of Kansas has made a mess out of the situation.”

Photo by Ekem/Wikimedia Commons

On July 7, 2013, a Middle Eastern man boarded a flight from Los Angeles to Oakland. He was bearing a 4-carat diamond worth $175,000, as well as two smaller, 2-carat gems, intending to sell them in Oakland to a man he'd met over Craigslist. The buyer paid for his plane ticket and also a limo, which picked him up at the airport and drove him to a location in El Cerrito, Calif., just north of Oakland.

It was at this point that the man surely started to notice something was wrong. The limo was supposed to go to a bank—or maybe a jewelry appraiser, the specifics aren't clear—but the driver instead drove to the location in El Cerrito.

That's when three men came out of hiding, at least one of whom was armed with a gun.

We know these details because the man—who the thieves left pistol-whipped and bloodied—was not the first to be robbed in such a manner. According to a recently released federal search warrant, the gang had made 17 other such robberies or attempted robberies, all under the same modus operandi: They'd offer to buy high-priced jewelry over Craigslist, pay for the flight out to Oakland (occasionally with a stolen credit card), rent a limo, and then ambush the victim at some secluded location.

In one case, the gang stole a Cartier ladies watch worth $90,000 from a Portland, Ore., victim. In another, they flew in a 22- or 23-year-old woman from Pennsylvania before relieving her of a Gold Presidential Rolex—the second such watch they'd stolen. The first, strong-armed from an "older" victim from Denver, they sold for $19,000.

Just about every day, someone is robbed after answering a Craigslist ad. The goods are usually relatively inexpensive: an iPhone, a used car, a bicycle. But the case of the Oakland jewelry robbers may be the most ambitious, highly organized, and lucrative Craigslist caper yet.

And the gang's alleged mastermind orchestrated the whole thing from prison.

...

Organized crime is migrating to the Internet, increasingly taking the face-to-face, back-alley meetups of Hollywood mafia out of the equation. Faceless, anonymous hackers steal credit card info from millions without ever needing to leave their bedrooms; shielded behind layers of anonymizing technology, drug dealers run marketplaces in hidden corners of the Internet, shipping a cornucopia of narcotics to customers they never meet and who pay in untraceable cryptocurrencies. The Oakland gang, however, is a reminder that traditional thieves are also using the Internet to find new and elaborate ways to relieve you of your valuables—in person.

The group's demise hardly began with a high-tech digital sting.

On June 20, a pair of police officers were on a stakeout in Oakland when they saw a stretch limo pull up nearby, hailed by a man on foot. The cops were there for a separate case, but they watched the limo closely as two more men approached, one brandishing a gun.

Either the passenger or the driver, who wasn't in on the robbery, figured out what was up. The car sped away. The three men, identified in court documents as Keegan Leecodi Cotton Jr., Jaedon Evans, and Rafael Davis, fled. But, pursued by the undercover cops, they didn't make it far. After looking into the men's cell phone records, investigators soon realized the female passenger, who'd flown in from Denver to sell a diamond, was hardly a unique victim.

And the suspects they already had in custody were only part of a larger, amorphous criminal enterprise, which stretched across the state of California.

It was in a small city 200 miles south of Oakland, in fact, where the FBI would catch its biggest break. By December, investigators had used cellphone records to track down one suspected conspirator to a cell at the California Men's Colony, a medium security prison in San Luis Obispo, where he was serving a seven-year sentence for a 2012 robbery conviction.  

A sweep of the man's cell uncovered a hidden, contraband phone, whose browser history was like a timeline of a scam in action. The phone's message inbox, too, was filled with incriminating conversations with other co-conspirators. The man has even occasionally called Craigslist sellers directly from his prison cell.

When they sat the prisoner down on Dec. 16 and confronted him, he was eager to cooperate. He'd made his son his criminal protege, who he'd "schooled"  on the "intricacies of criminal conspiracy," according to the affidavit. Now the younger man risked following his father's footsteps in other ways: The three men arrested in June had implicated him as a co-conspirator. So in a desperate bid to reduce his son's potential sentence, the inmate—identified in court documents as only a Confidential Human Source, or CHS—told agents everything.

That's how the FBI learned about 18 of the group's robberies, including the diamond and Rolex thefts. It's also how they managed to monitor one of the last outstanding members of the gang: Michael Anthony Martin, who went by the nickname Diesel and often set up the limo rides for the victims. Martin alternated between hiring an unsuspecting driver or using an accomplice. His preferred rental agency was Avis. 

Even after the June 20 arrest, Martin was still orchestrating robberies. One, in December, unknowingly put him in the middle of an FBI sting. Agents had identified a potential victim via phone records, then used an agent to pose as the woman. After getting in a limo procured by Martin at the Oakland airport, the agent quickly realized the driver wasn't an innocent professional. She was actually one of Martin's accomplices. The agent called off the sting for her own safety.

In January, with police listening in, the CHS called Martin to plan future thefts. Over the course of multiple conversations, Martin unknowingly implicated himself in many of the alleged crimes, including the violent attack on the owner of the $175,000 diamond. (For reasons that aren't made clear in the warrant, the thieves only made off with the two smaller gems.)

But the arrest in June had left him jumpy, Martin revealed. He told the CHS he was so worried the police were onto him that he "looked out the window every morning at 5:00, had a bag packed, an escape route, and a motorcycle without a tag," according to the affidavit.

Those precautions didn't help. Shortly after that conversation, police raided Martin's home in Tracy, Calif. There, they found a .38 caliber pistol, which he could not legally possess due to a 1998 robbery conviction.

Martin turned 40 years old on Feb. 3. He celebrated from inside a jail cell in Sacramento. It's not clear what will happen to the CHS, or his son. "The FBI has made no promises to the CHS," the search warrant affidavit makes sure to stress.

Photo via Kim Alaniz/Flickr

Even for a casual reader of the Internet, seeing the words “Craigslist” and “Florida” in the same sentence is enough to produce a shiver of dread. Throw in the phrase “Walmart parking lot” and you’ve got the makings of a botched crime almost too bizarre to believe. And yet ...

Two young men, Darius Beasley and Jamichael Tucker, were arrested on Tuesday in Pensacola over a supposed kidnapping attempt that began with the victim posting in Craigslist’s “For Sale” section. He claims he had sought a buyer for a $4,500 wedding ring and seen a reply from Beasley, who met him at his truck, parked outside a Walmart, envelope of cash in hand. 

Beasley allegedly entered the vehicle and made the exchange as agreed, but as soon as he did, Tucker appeared at the driver’s side window with a gun, according to the victim. He then opened the door and tried to duct tape the man’s wrists, only to have him escape and start running. The two suspects bolted for their own car and drove off, but the victim got back his truck and gave chase, which apparently prompted Tucker to lean out of his window and start shooting at him.

A deputy eventually pulled the pair over to arrest them. Miraculously, none of the three men nor any bystanders were injured. As lucky as the victim was here, we’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that you don’t chase guys with guns when you’re unarmed, you shouldn’t sell something worth more than $20 on Craigslist (eBay, anyone?), and you never, ever meet an Internet stranger in some random parking lot. 

Alternatively, just try to stay married.  

H/T pnj.com | Photo by randomretail/Flickr   

Any Craigslist ad that blames Mark Wahlberg for a perceived injustice is going to be Internet gold. That’s how the missive of one Georgia man attempting to sell his silver Mini Cooper for parts begins. He states that he watched the 2003 remake of the heist film The Italian Job, and totally bought Wahlberg’s badassery. And also a Mini Cooper like the one featured in the film:

So I'm just sitting there, watching 'The Italian Job', drinking my IPA, wondering what it is Mark Wahlberg does all day when he's not filming. I like to think he's a really nice person with good taste in red wine. About 3/4ths of the way through the movie I get this voice in my head: "BUY A MINI COOPER!" "SELL YOUR VW AND BUY A MINI!" "MINI COOPERS ARE SOOOO HOT RIGHT NOW!" Straight to the dealer I went and bought this here silver mini. "'Coopers are soooo hot right now" the salesman told me.

He doesn’t specify when “right now” was, but he does go on to explain the beginning of his Mini Cooper’s demise, one week after buying his dream car. His narrative style keeps you on the edge of your seat, much like the plot of The Italian Job. In this scene, our protagonist is running late for work, and remembers he’s basically Mark Wahlberg driving a Mini Cooper in The Italian Job:

Right then and there, I hit a hard left by that fantastic local organic fair-trade free-range grass-fed coffee roasters and realized my skinny jeans were just a little too skinny and vintage; I couldn't hit the clutch pedal right and slipped out of gear, my limp wrist couldn't turn the steering wheel fast enough to break the fishtail I was going into, my feathered hair went into my eyes and I couldn't see the road! Boom. Hit a fruit stand. If only life were like a Michael Bay movie, the 'Cooper would have sailed right through, and I'd have kept speeding down the street, preferably with Mark Wahlberg at the wheel and me in the passenger seat. Mark Wahlberg could have made that hard left by the coffee shop, no prob. And why is there always a fruit stand!? You never see fruit stands except when there's a car going way too fast down the road.

He also provides several photos of the exterior and interior of the vehicle, as well as this work of art, for context.
 

Ah, the death of a hipster's dream. In addition to scrap parts, he also offers a cautionary tale about material excess and hero worship. And if you’re going to emulate Wahlberg in any movie, obviously make it Michael Bay’s 2013 masterpiece Pain & Gain.

Image via Eva Rinaldi/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Ladies of r/gonewild (NSFW), listen up: an Austin-based photographer is making y’all an offer you can (and probably should) refuse. He wants to come to your house and shoot you in various states of undress, then he’d like you to post the photos on r/gonewild and link to his website so he can get more traffic. And he’d like you to do all this work for him to the tune of absolutely zero dollars.

Here’s the ad, which was posted on Craigslist about a week ago:

(If you need a sec to run to the pharmacy, get a thing of hand sanitizer and methodically rub it all over your body, take your time. We’ll be here when you get back.)

Not surprisingly, Redditors were similarly creeped out when someone posted the ad in r/austin:

(Screengrabs, r/austin)

The original poster also included his address, which Redditors discovered matches the contact info of Matthew Chambers, a photographer based in an Austin suburb whose website features “boudoir photography,” or semi-racy portraits of young women in their intimates.

The website appears to be professional, and Chambers’ work is… fine, if you’re into that sort of thing. So if any r/gonewild hopefuls want to respond to this guy’s ad, feel free to do so, with the knowledge you most likely won’t end up being made into a skin suit. But still, dude is trying to get ladies nekkid for free so he can drive traffic to his site, which doesn’t exactly put him on the shortlist for any amateur pornographer ethics awards.

H/T Reddit via Craigslist | Photo by elsie esq./Flickr (CC BY - 2.0)

If a naked stranger arrives at your door in the middle of the night, here’s what you should probably do: 1) Make sure he is, in fact, a naked stranger, and not a merman who fell in love with you 15 years ago during a vacation to Cape Cod (in which case, NBD). 2) Call the police. 3) Call Jason Willis’ probation officer and tell him that his client is violating his parole. 

ABC news affiliate WISN 2 reports that Willis, a 31-year-old man from Waterford, Wisc., has been banned from the Internet for posting a Craigslist sex ad in his female neighbor’s name, sending a parade of naked strangers to her door.

In addition to being banned from the Internet, Willis has also been sentenced to 2 and a half years probation, and will go to jail for 18 months if he violates his parole. 

According to Willis’ neighbor Dawn (WISN only identifies her by her first name, to protect her identity), Willis posted the ads in her name a year and a half ago as a “prank.” For months, Willis would send naked men over to Dawn’s apartment from his computer next door, occasionally even watching the men ring her doorbell. She still has nightmares about strange men pulling through her driveway.

"It was just a joke to him. To me, that's not my idea of a joke. It's not my idea of a prank. You don't send men to a single woman's home with her daughter there," Dawn told WISN.

Shockingly, this is not the first time that someone has posted a Craigslist sex ad in someone else’s name as a prank, or as a form of creepy revenge. Last year, a Library of Congress employee was busted for posting a Craigslist casual encounters ad directing men to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, and a Pennsylvania teen girl was also arrested for posting a prostitution ad on behalf of another teenage girl that same year. 

H/T WISN 12 | Photo by Elvert Barnes/Flickr (CC BY - 2.0)