Twenty years later, after I started posting about Craigslist creeps, and they still haven’t figured out how to take a hint.
Police in Boynton Beach, Florida, arrested 51-year-old Maximiliano Buitrago of Boca Raton this week after he responded to a craigslist ad offering summer babysitting services. Thankfully, the ad wasn’t real. It was posted by undercover detectives from the department’s Human Exploitation Unit, and Buitrago walked right into it.
According to police, he messaged the “babysitter,” who investigators say he knew to be 14, and asked her, “Are you trying to make cash any other way?” and “What else can you do?”
Buitrago allegedly kept confirming her age while offering her cash for videos he claimed would be sold to clients overseas, and when he showed up to meet her in person at a Boynton Beach park on July 16th, officers were waiting for him instead.
He had cards in his car pitching easy money for pics and short videos on TikTok. He’s allegedly confessed and is sitting in the Palm Beach County jail now. Detectives think there are more victims out there, so if you’ve got one of those cards or a message thread with this guy, call them.
And what’s old is new again, as I wrote about a version of this exact scam back in 2008. A Maine father posted a craigslist ad advertising his handyman services because he needed to feed his kids. A man emailed him offering to pay for sex with one of his children.
The father, being the kind of decent human being this story needed, called the cops instead of entertaining the offer for even a second. That case ended with an arrest too, but the lesson never seemed to take. Craigslist was crawling with people like that in 2008, and evidently it still is in 2026, just wearing a TikTok-money pitch instead of a straightforward proposition.
And while I understand that these were police detectives placing the ad, if you’re the kind of parent who lets your 14-year-old post a babysitting ad on craigslist with their contact information attached, you need to have a serious conversation with yourself about what that platform actually is and who’s browsing it.
Craigslist isn’t the go-to marketplace it was in 2008. Most people have moved on to apps and Facebook Marketplace for this kind of thing. But that’s precisely why the guys still trolling it are the ones who never left. They’re the ones who’ve been refining this same pitch for nearly two decades because it still occasionally works.
Craigslist creeps are like roaches after the lights go out. Everybody else cleared the room, and they’re still there, scuttling around in the dark, looking for anyone who wandered back in.
(Source)
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