Showing posts with label Pet Scam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pet Scam. Show all posts

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Scam Spotting: Is this kitten for sale page on Facebook legit or not?

Someone brought this to the attention of /r/scams... is this legit?

FB page claims to have Sphynx kittens for sale at $600 
The initial page is already problematic. Google photo search comes up with a for sale ad from south Australia town of Glenunga.


Scrolling through the cute photos shows they've been advertising these cats since January 20th, 2017.

A volunteer contacted them via Facebook Messenger, and they claimed to be in Dallas, TX.


Their first timeline photo is this cat:


While I cannot find the EXACT photo, it was pretty obvious it was a screencap from a video, as I was able to find this photo of the same cat, the same potted plant, the same plastic sheet on the same table, just different pose, but it's from a classified ad in Granada, Spain.  There's a video below (no longer available) so presumably, that's where the above "photo" came from.



Tuesday, November 7, 2017

This Is How Internet Pet Scam Break Your Heart and How You Can Avoid it



Pet scams are all over the place, and pet scammers have moved onto the Internet as well. Current generation of pet scammers create fake "adoption" websites, then hand you off to associates with fake pet shipping services with an excuse for additional fees.

A woman in Milwaukee was duped by a fake kitten adoption website. The man claimed to be in Virginia and will ship her a kitten for $170... Except he demanded payment via a reloadable gift card, not regular methods. Then later, when a separate scammer called her, claimed they need to "recrate" the kitten at the airport for additional $840 that's "refundable" she knew she'd been had. They even used the name of a real pet transport service.

A Delaware woman was duped into sending money via Western Union to a scammer for deposit on a toy poodle, and even told the woman to go to Baltimore, MD to pick it up, except the address was bogus... The man living at that address had no pets, much less a toy poodle.

Delta Airlines discovered that someone had created a fake pet transport service using Delta's name called DeltaPetTransit.com, complete with Delta's logo and pictures of its planes, used by pet scammers to trick people out of even more money.