Fake puppy-sale websites have ‘saturated’ internet
Bae is a 19-week-old Siberian husky with tawny brown markings and cerulean eyes. She’s available for $1,500 on the website of Theresa Rosales, a breeder who is licensed by the Department of Agriculture and offers AKC registrations for all puppies she sells out of her Hamer, S.C., home. Photos show the pup standing near to a wooden fence and bright red roses.
One of those photos also can be found on websites called candyhuskies.us and diamondhuskies. us. On those sites, however, Bae is called Tilla, and she’s listed at the much lower price of $600. Neither site lists the name or location of a breeder, and they encourage potential customers to email.
Bae’s alternate identity is no surprise to Rosales, who said her puppies’ photos are regularly copied and used on other sites that claim to sell dogs. And it’s no surprise to officials at the Better Business Bureau, which this week released a report warning that online pet sales scams are “victimizing Americans at an alarming rate.”
This kind of scam happens like much online fraud, the report said: A product is advertised on a professional-looking site. Customers are asked to wire the purchase price, and then they’re asked for additional fees. In the end, the product is never delivered.
The bureau says its ScamTracker website has received more than 1,000 complaints about such faux puppy enterprises, and its investigation cited a 2015 Federal Trade Commission internal report that found a majority of 37,000 pet-related complaints involved fraudulent sales.
“I knew this was a problem, but it’s worse than I thought,” said Steve Baker, a Better Business Bureau international investigations specialist who wrote the report. “This has just saturated the internet.”
The problem is probably a logical outgrowth of two concurrent trends: a growing pet population and an increase in shopping online — a universe where, Baker said, it’s nearly impossible to search for a puppy without wading through fake websites.
And much like online dating scams, the puppy versions prey on people’s emotions. Baker said several victims he spoke to lost thousands of dollars and ended up brokenhearted.
Fake pet sales have become so pervasive that the attorneys general of three states — Ohio, Arizona and Virginia — have issued warnings to residents in the past year.
Animal protection advocates say all this underscores the importance of seeing a potential pet in person — both to ensure it exists and to get a look at the breeding setting.
Or, as the John Goodwin of the Humane Society of the United States put it: “Show me the mommy.”