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The hacker/activist group Anonymous and the Church of Scientology have famously had it out with each other for the past several years, and it looks like the pot is beginning to boil again. A member of Anonymous sent us an email describing Scientology's alleged abuse of Craigslist as a means to recruit new members.

Our tipster writes that "Anonymous has attempted to use Craigslist's flagging system to take down their ads, as they are constantly violating terms of use with ridiculous amounts of postings in a number of cities across the United States and Canada. In New York City, San Francisco, and Houston, over 100 ads are posted in a single day... sometimes over 200...Repeated e-mails to Craigslist about the constant violations of their terms of use had gone unanswered, so we started thinking out of the box and posting 'counter ads'. We posted hundreds of ads across the U.S., using the same or similar titles to the Scientology ads, warning of the true nature of the ads in as many humorous or noticeable ways as we could."

Here's an example of these so-called counter ads.

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Anonymous

And another:

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Anonymous

You get the idea.

There's another wrinkle to the story, however. Our tipster continued:

'When we began posting more counter ads, our ads were flagged down within a minute or two of being posted. Even before being live in the main list. There are only two ways this could have happened: a) by flagging software, which is also illegal according to Craigslist and can supposedly result in permanent banning or b) by Craigslist themselves ignoring Co$'s posts and taking down ours, acting against their own policies and supporting the Church's position despite blatant misuse of the site.

'We are outraged that this continues to happen under the supervision of Craigslist, and they have seemingly chosen to do nothing.'

We emailed Craigslist for their side of the story. We'll update this post when we hear back.

If you want all the context on this long-raging feud, you can read up on Anonymous's Project Chanology here.





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