Sheryl Harris wrote an article about puppy scams and a recent case in Ohio. In particular, she wrote:

"Wiring money to a stranger overseas is never a good idea. Once you wire money, it's gone. And scam artists like to target Americans from abroad because it's harder for law enforcement here to investigate."

That is exactly our point when we mention this in our article about trying to recover your money from an overseas scammer. Once you have sent your money to the scammer, the money is gone forever. Whether it is a pet, a large sum of cash, valuable commodity or whatever the scammer was trying to sell, you will not receive them because they are all made-up stories.

Checkout this article written by a reporter herself about an encounter with the Puppy Scam. Fortunately, Victoria did her due diligence and managed to find out that the too-good-to-be-true offer is a scam. That is smart - never let greed get into your head to part with the money easily.

The police officer commented: "People get taken in by this sort of thing all the time,” he said. “Computers are a great thing, but sometimes with good comes evil. The bad guys are using this technology to their advantage.”

Puppy scams appear to be on the rise recently. On one hand, buyers are scammed when they paid but did not receive their pets. On the other, sellers are scammed into paying for shipment or other costs before they can get their pets delivered.

And while we keep telling people not to send their personal information over to strangers, we have so many online social networking sites with billions of personal pictures posted. The scammers are not short of resources for their scam. They can simply capture any images of a model, pet or products by others to help in their scamming. Don't be surprise if your pet's picture has been used to scam someone else, as mentioned in the news by 10news.com.

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10News Investigates Online Puppy Scams

Pedigreed puppies are worth big money, especially to cons running an international scam. Now, the effort to protect consumers from a scam is picking up steam.

Joy Schick’s Yorkshire terrier Lord Fredrick was part of the family, but at 17 years old, he got sick and had to be put to sleep.
Click here to find out more! Schick decided to get a new puppy, but nixed her neighborhood pet shop.

“We just thought their prices were a little out of range. They wanted $3,000 for a Yorkie," said Schick.

Schick stumbled on a newspaper classified ad that offered a purebred Yorkshire for $400.

Visit the site to read full report...

We received a report regarding pet scammers. This is the critical part of the email from the scammer:

"I have a fenced yard and i will take good care of the pet as well payment will, payment will  be issued with a check or money order. The payment will bear the cost of the pet plus shipping cost which will be included in the payment.All you need to do is that as soon as you recieve the payment,you will deduct the $300 and then then contact the shipping company inorder to send the remaining funds to the shipper.here is the email of the shipping company globalshippingcompany07@yahoo.com for the remaining funds. that will enable the shipping company come for the pickup of the pet right in your destination without any stress. The funds sent will be the shipping cost.This simply means that you will not be paying the shipping company from your pocket ."

What is wrong here? It appears to be a logical arrangement, but our reader is careful and managed to spot scam.

This is an overdue publish of a submission by one of our visitors regarding puppy scams. Further checks were done on the internet search and we find that these are real scams experienced by quite a number of people.

Original Message from Submission:

"Please let your readers know about the latest scam coming from the Nigerians (not all but these people make it bad for all).  They are advertising in local newspapers and wbsites (puppyfind, support puppies) advertising purebred dogs at great prices ( remember if it sounds too good it usually is)...."