The Ed Newman NYC Apartment Scam On Craigslist

THIS IS A SCAM ALERT
Last summer someone contacted me to confirm whether I had an apartment available in Manhattan. I informed this person that I indeed did not have such an apartment for rent.

Evidently someone posing as me has been placing a Craigslist advertisement regarding an apartment in the West Village just off Bleecker Street about three blocks from the river.

The person running the Craigslist ad not only says he is Ed Newman but that he is Director of Advertising at AMSOIL in Superior, Wisconsin. Evidently he is using these details to establish his credibility.

The first time this occurred I thought it strange, but imagined it would go away. I notified the potential victim that I am not advertising an apartment in New York City, though it looks like an interesting part of town. (Well, anywhere on Manhattan is probably interesting.)

A few months passed and I was contacted yet again. This time I attempted to do something about it, but couldn't find the ad so I was unable to have it deleted. This past month now, three people have contacted me to verify that I am I. Yes, I am Ed Newman, but I am not the person who placed the ad on Craigslist.

Two of these found me by means of Linked In, and I am grateful for their due diligence. I replied by letting them know (as I did the others) that I am not the one placing the ads, and then asked that they send the correspondence they had with this joker who claimed to be me. This is the letter from my impersonator:

Hello,
Thanks for your email. I am Ed Newman, owner of the Unit at ( 295 West 11th St, West Village New York, NY 10014 ) currently listed for $1400 with security deposit $1000. It is very much available for a ready to move in tenant. Utilities: water, Gas and electric are included in rent.

I presently live and work in Wisconsin with AMSOIL, INC. 925 Tower Ave. Superior, WI 54880 Wisconsin as, Director of Advertising.

I have received a dozen of mails about the apartment since I put it on Craigs list. We just need someone to take care of the unit until we decide what to do with it since my Job here may keep me for a couple of years, this is why we chose to put it up for rent. We are actually seeking a renter that will guarantee a good maintenance of the unit like it is theirs, It is not really about the money, this is why it is low in price but not withstanding, all due processes must be observed.

Note: We will only accept a ready tenant, willing and able to pay 1 month rent and a security deposit for a start. We are only willing to offer a one year maximum lease for now but might be extended however, pending..... Let us know a bit of you, please fill out the form bellow with genuine details, thanks.

Regards Ed Newman

* * * *

Lest I have not made myself clear, the above is not from the real Ed Newman. In each case the emails have a Canadian source, and not my own address that ends in @northlc.com

After the second time, I made an attempt last fall to have the ad pulled. It proved to be a bit complicated and other issues assumed greater prominence.

Right now, I would welcome any assistance on how to proceed. I really don't want to see anyone stripped of their hard-earned cash due to this kind of deception.

* * * *

One of my first published articles for which I was paid nearly thirty years ago was titled "Look Before you Leap" and dealt with the variety of ways immoral people take advantage of innocent and unsuspecting people. I'd been duped a couple times and decided to do something about it. I couldn't get my money back, but I could warn others. That's what I am doing again here.  

Be wise. 

Looking for a Job? How To Make A Parachute

In the early 1980’s when I had returned from a year in Mexico I needed to find a way to plug in to the job market. A book that was exceedingly helpful to me that year was Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? Peter Drucker praised it and so do I. The sub-title is A Practical Manual for Job Hunters & Career Changers.

Now when I discovered this book, the advice I was urged to follow was this: skip the book and do the exercises in the appendix. Sure enough, this was superb advice at the time because those exercises helped shape and affirm a strong sense of self-concept that proved to be the real key in my career success.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, whereupon the wise counsel “Know Thyself” was inscribed, Bolles directs us to the only valid start-point in a career. Who am I and what can I contribute? Without clarity here, the whole process of interviews, resumes, applications gets pretty grainy.

A recent BusinessWeek story (April 30, 2009) stated that there are 3 million job vacancies in the U.S. right now. This is fairly significant mismatch, in part due to some unusual factors. The housing crisis has made it challenging for many people to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. Another problem is that a lot of today’s unemployed are untrained in areas where there are needs. Experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not easily found amongst the ranks of the hammer-and-nail construction layoffs.

The advice that follows may not apply to everyone, but it is something that worked for at least one fellow in the tech sector, formerly employed by Yahoo!, named Jeff Scott. What do tech people do for fun? They go to places like Mashup Camp and play hacker games, among other things. Networking, learning new skills, new tools…

Mashup Camp is a production of Techweb’s Aleternative Events Group which aims to bring Internet developers and attendees into close proximity in an unconference-style event. The first Mashup Camp took place in February 2006. The highlight is a competition to see who can develop the best mashups. (A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple sources.)

Jeff Scott not only won a Dell E248WFP 24-inch Widescreen Black Flat Panel LCD Monitor, he landed himself a job by means of a mashup he created titled I NEED A JOB. Using Mozenda data harvesting technology Scott essentially sewed his own parachute. The net result: Scott is now publisher and editor of 148Apps.com, an iPhone App News and Review blog launched in 2008.

A PRWeb story explained. Scott designed his Mashup to help people who are now or soon will be out of a job. The mashup takes the text from your resume or a URL pointing to your resume or Linked In profile and processes the text through Yahoo! Text Extraction to get key terms about you, your skills and job experience. Then it processes over 50,000 Craigslist.org listings all scraped from the Craigslist site by Mozenda looking for the best matches for your skills. It then ranks, by city, the best places for you to look for a new job possibly giving you some options you wouldn't have considered previously.

According to Scott the speed with which one can get set up setup for creating, testing and scraping templates with Mozenda was most impressive. “The quick setup and testing is the killer feature,” said Scott. “What Mozenda does isn't unique, it's the way they do it that rocks.”

As they used to say in the old days, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know if they skin cats anywhere these days, but for sure there are a lot of people in need of good parachutes. I wonder if there's money to be made in writing mashups for job hunters. Or maybe those Mozenda folks can help you write your own. Nowadays parachute makers weave code instead of fabric. The goal, in either case, is a soft landing.