Unbelievable Scam!

[Mom's Animal Preserve]

I'm really disappointed that I can no longer even trust my local classifieds when it comes to helping people rehome their pets. First, let me say that I live in Southern Maryland, about 50 miles south of Washington D.C. and we have an online classified for people to post all sorts of stuff for sale and giveaway, including pets. i'm not referring to craigslist, this is a local site that has info on events, real estate, stuff for the kids, homes for sale, etc, but it's a southern Maryland run site.

Anyway, I'm checking out the bird classifieds a few days ago and I see an ad for Hyacinth Macaws. Of course, the red flag goes up immediately, because the title of the ad says "hyacinth" but the body of the ad says B&G AND they are being rehomed. No price or fee stated. So I emailed the poster asking a few questions, saying that I'm interested because I want to know if this is a scam or not. Here's the unbelievable part.....

I was sent back an email stating that the seller had moved from Prince Frederick, MD to Singapore and that all I would have to pay is shipping on Air France to get the birds. The email claims that a Christian family owns the pets and they are doing missionary work and can no longer keep them. It rambles on about the kids of the poster being in college and that they can't believe how grown up they are, yada, yada, yada.

Ok, so a HUGE RED FLAG the size of China is up now. The email was such a line of baloney that I was just sitting here in amazement. They only wanted to charge me $600 each (there were two) and this was only to cover shipping of the birds to me via Air France. All I had to do was send my hard earned money to these scam artists and I have two new birds.

But, it gets EVEN better! The body of the email is almost identical to one that I received when responding to an add for "FREE bulldog puppies" from the southern maryland craigslist. Different classified venue, but same BS response. They just replace the word bulldog with macaw. Of course,m I knew that email was a scam too, especially when I played along and told the poster that I wanted local vet references from them in Southern Maryland before I would take the puppies from them because, after all, I couldn't meet the puppies in person and I needed confirmation that these were reliable people who had well bred pups. Of course, I got no reply to my email. Oh yeah, and they sent photos of "themselves" with the puppies so that I could see what the looked like and could choose one. Yeah, right!

And just when I thought it couldn't get any more creepy, I scroll down in their email, and, true to form, they have sent me photos of a man with the macaws, and wouldn't you know, I have seen these EXACT photos on the Bird Board Classifieds for two hyacinth macaws. The ad was posted on Bird Board last August. I frankly don't know if that ad is real or not either, but this just took the cake!

A couple lessons learned for me from all of this that I wanted to share with you.... (1) Please, please, please confirm any ad for a "free" or almost free animal of any type that some one posting, even local to your home town. Make sure you see the animal in person with your own eyes. I'm not saying that you must pay a rehoming or adoption fee for the animal to be legit. Nor am I saying that all free pets are scams, but unfortunately, the invention of the internet brought us a whole new type of scam artist and you really have to be careful. (2) Your photos are not safe on the web. Once they are out there, they are "free" for anyone to take and use in their scam (or any other medium). As much as you'd like them to be, they are no longer your intellectual property. If you want to prevent your photos from being used by unscrupulous people, you need to watermark them or otherwise prevent them from being accessed or copied by people you don't know. I'm not a web design expert, so I can't give advice on how to do this, but I do know that simply putting code in the page that prevents people from using "copy and paste" is not enough. All they need to do is use "select all" from the pulldown menus and they can still copy your stuff.

I'm sorry for the really long post, but I felt it was important to share so that no one gets scammed and loses their money.

[Xen]

I don't know why these people bother. Surely they can't sucker in many people now... with the same story, photos etc as the next fake advert???

I was browsing pet classifieds today and came across a "STOP - any parrot" listing. He says he can get you any parrot and deliver it to your door. He gives a name and number to call too. Just didn't feel right to me... got a bad vibe.

[Mom's Animal Preserve]

Yeah, that would have given me a bad vibe too. What's nuts about the one on my local classifieds is that you have to pay to post the ad. It's $19.95. I can see them spamming free ads, but you would think that having to pay to post would deter them.

[BigBird]

Unfortunately people are still getting sucked in by these people and sending them money.

[ndeben]

Dont worry about the length of your post,, you found a scam artist, I have had 2 myself, I did not fall for them.. When asked for money, I asked if I could pay COD. and no more emails from them.. just tell others to be careful. they know animal lovers easily give our hearts for a sob story.. may the burn in hell.