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Pet Scams


International Puppy Scam Hits New Zealand

An international scam is targeting local pet lovers.

A Whangarei woman, who does not want to be named, alerted the Whangarei Leader after she replied to an advert for an English bulldog puppy.

The ad wanted $600 for the puppy. The only contact details were a Yahoo email address.

She emailed the seller and was told to transfer the money through Western Union because the Christchurch seller was moving to Australia and needed the money as soon as possible.

She went to the Onerahi Post Shop to make the transaction only to be told it was a scam – she was the third person wanting to transfer money for an English bulldog.

Dogs and Puppy Scam Reported at Gumtree Classifieds

Please bewarned if you are searching for a pet at Gumtree classifieds. The following alerts were posted at Gumtree. One of the posters sent out a post to warn fellow surfers that the pets and dogs listed on the page are all scams. In particular, h...

Pet Scam: Free Husky Puppies

One of our readers discovered that he was almost scammed, after checking out the comments by others at Yorkie Puppy Scam report. The following is a summary of the story:1) The scammer is located in Africa.2) He will post an ad on the local papers/...

US: Atlanta Airport Issues Pet Scam Warnings

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport officials want the public to be aware of a pet scam involving bogus purchases and false claims that animals are being detained at the airport.

The airport has some tips:

• Recent scams have come from Cameroon shipping, Atlanta_intl_airport@usa.com and pet_department001@mail2aaron.com.

• Scam e-mails use unofficial airport e-mail addresses. All official Department of Aviation e-mails will have @atlanta-airport.com addresses.

• Be wary of sellers who communicate only through e-mail. A legitimate transaction should allow the buyer to communicate directly with the breeder and the veterinarian to inquire about the animal’s medical history.

• Beware of sellers who use pressure tactics in e-mail communication.

• Avoid sellers who accept only wire payments or money orders. Use a payment method that offers fraud protection, such as a credit card.

Yorkie Puppy Scam

If you receive an email like this offering puppies for free, it is a puppy scam. This offer is too good to be true and the scammer will eventually provide reasons for you to pay for something. If you love dogs, he will exploit this weakness after drawing you in for a "free deal" which turn out isn't free.

Do not fall for it. Check out all our visitors comments below. Many have experienced such scams either through email or online classifieds. Some are even approached by strangers.

-----Attached-----
From: Tony Brown <revtonybrown@gmail.com>
Subject: About my Yorkie babies
Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 5:19 PM
*Greetings to you from the house of the lord,

Puppy Scams Still Going Strong

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.

Canadian Reporter on Puppy Scams

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.”



Sorry, the original news link is broken...

Investigation of Online Puppy Scams

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...

Pet scams targeted at individuals

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.

Puppy Scams

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)...."