Craigslist is having a predator renaissance in 2026, or a “prenaissance,” if you will. I’ve only written a handful of craigslist stories this year, but that’s a handful more than I’d managed in a long time, since Facebook Marketplace has been eating the old classifieds giant’s lunch for ages. I went for years without giving craigslist a second thought. Now here I am again, and the reason isn’t a pleasant one.
This story out of Salt Lake City starts back in June, when someone browsing Craigslist ran across a listing for a bed and found it suspicious enough to call the police. The bed, a white velvet platform model going for $200, appeared by itself in one photo. Then every other picture in the post showed the same young girl, who police say looked to be about twelve, sitting on it in a small nightgown and posing in ways no child should ever be asked to pose.
Then there was the description, which promised a “great super fun bed, all inclusive,” said there was plenty you could do with it, and invited readers to message the seller privately about ‘renting’ it. If the pictured bed wasn’t ideal, the ad added, there were ‘other options.’
On the surface, this sounds like it could be a child trafficking case, which is exactly the thing craigslist used to be infamous for. The word “rent” sitting next to photos of a little girl is enough to make anyone’s skin crawl, and police clearly felt the same way. They got a warrant for the email address tied to the post, and craigslist came back with the name of the person behind it. What investigators say they actually found isn’t trafficking, but it’s just as bad.
That name belonged to 22-year-old Miles Anderson, who was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail on Tuesday for investigation of ten counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of obstruction of justice. Police concluded the ad was less a front for anything than an alleged fishing expedition for CSAM, and they believe the photos came from somebody else in the first place.
When detectives came knocking, Anderson reached for one of the lamest excuses in the book. He claimed he had stumbled across the material, downloaded it in bulk, and turned it into a “predator poaching post,” as if he were the first person in history to think of that one. Anyone who follows this site has heard that line so many times it ought to come with a royalty check for whoever came up with it first.
Anderson is said to have told police that he deleted most of the files afterward and then admitted that before sitting down with detectives, he wiped the rest because he was “scared.” Fear is a funny emotion for a man who was supposedly out there fighting crime as a CSAM vigilante.
The trouble for Anderson is that the rest of the evidence doesn’t read like the work of someone trying to catch bad guys. Police say they found a WhatsApp message from April in which his number asked a recipient, in Spanish, whether they had CSAM to trade, and a warrant on his Gmail account allegedly turned up more than ten files of the stuff. If that’s a sting operation, it’s the worst one ever devised.
So is this a fluke, or is craigslist sliding back into the online hive of scum and villainy it was in its heyday? It remains to be seen whether these new craigslist stories are an anomaly or the start of a trend, and I’d love to believe it’s just a coincidence. I’m not counting on it.
For now, craigslist has piqued my interest again. We’ll see if it again demands my attention.
(Sources)
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