What’s dumber than pretending to sell a toddler on Craigslist? Doing it two weeks after a similar ad led to federal investigations.

A 19-year-old woman from Appollo Beach, Florida is today waiting to hear if she’ll face criminal charges over a bogus ad on the online classifieds site. She voluntarily visited a police station yesterday and was interviewed about the incident by a detective.

According to ABC News, the woman had posted a listing in the “Brand New or Hardly Used” category offering to sell an 18-month old girl because she no longer had time to look after her thanks to a successful career. The ad also requested that she be able meet the girl when she was 16 so she “can understand the pain she has caused me”.

On the face of it, this would simply be a particularly stupid and tasteless prank. But it’s even worse for several reasons.

First, the woman herself genuinely does have a young child. She may well be a perfectly good mother, but her confession hasn’t just earned her a day out at the police station: local child protection staff are now going to be visiting her home to give her parenting skills a thorough examination.

Second, the woman included a photograph with the ad but, rather than use a shot of her own child, she simply grabbed a random online image. Of course it’s perfectly possible the child in the picture would never be recognized, and may even be an adult today. But surely an ounce of common sense would tell you there’s a good chance such an ad would attract a lot of attention and could cause hurt or embarrassment to the parents of the pictured child.

And to make things even worse, the ad comes just a couple of weeks after a presumably-bogus ad offering to sell a four-month old baby for $7,000 caused a hullabaloo in Cordova, Tennessee, with local authorities bringing in the FBI.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:55 am under Advertising.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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