My girlfriend and I were looking for an Akita puppy in Northern Virginia and we found a puppy similar to what we were looking for on dogsnow.com for $400 sold by a Jennifer Stone. For more information we are directed to oodle.com where we see that Jennifer does not actually live in VA, but in Georgia. Well ok, we thought. We can make a day trip. So we contact Jennifer and guess what, she just moved to Colorado with all the puppies!
She tells us her husband, who was the breeder, just passed away from Depleted Uranium poisoning (really?), and now she just wants to find these puppies a good home. Truly a heart breaking story. She continues for days asking about our family and lifestyle, what we're like, what kind of environment will the puppy live in, etc. She likes our answers and says, great, with our ok she will schedule the puppy transport with a company who specializes in animal shipments, and will handle the payment transfer.
Admittedly, this sounded a little strange. She wouldn't even say who the shipping company was. So we decided to test her story with some questions of our own. We asked for more pictures, copies of papers, description of parents and details on personality. All responses were vague giving little information. Pictures of the parents didn't match the puppies, and no papers were ever produced. But we figured the final test would be who the shipping company turns out to be.
Jennifer says she will make the arrangements, and we will receive an email from the shipper with further instructions. Later we received a poorly written spam-type email from a fraudulent uship.com broker from hotmail address: [email protected], named ELVIS TANJONG, and phone number 303-351-6837.
For starters, uship.com is a valid company with it's own domain. Any email from them will end with @uship.com. Not hotmail! But even worse was the email content. It was terribly formatted like it was done by a 3rd grader. But the real give away was the payment instructions asking us to please wire money to Cameroon via Western Union. A man calls us, and with a thick accent, poor reception, and a BLOCKED number, he informs us that when we buy the money order to send money to a friend not a business and to provide him the ten digit code in an order confirmation email.
He assures us that nobody can take the money until the puppy arrives and the receipt is given to the delivery driver (NOT TRUE WITH WESTERN UNION all you need is that 10 digit code to cash the money order). When I told him no body in the US does business this way OR does shipping this way (especially of animals) he hangs up! Classic scam. So we email them back saying, We don't trust you, if you do indeed have this puppy, you better give it back to the breeder immediately. Then we try to contact Jennifer and warn her of the scam.
Shortly after, the perpetrators call to confirm the cancellation of the shipment and warn us that this will result in sending the puppy to Quarantine. He also says that if Jennifer does not come to get the puppy they will sue for animal abandonment.
Jennifer replies saying uship.com has contacted her saying we have denied payment, why have we done this too her? She trusted us! So in our sadness we have accepted that Jennifer Stone does not exist. Further investigation into this matter found the following scam reports and/or complaints:
In retrospect these were some weird things we missed. Jennifers email on dogsnow.com and oodle.Co is formatted like so: jenniferstone200 - g m a i L&c 0 m Her profile name is jiberish, spelled Rfghghgh G. Pictures of the puppies she sent us didn't match the ones on the dogsnow.com
Pictures of the parents don't resemble the puppies
Pictures of the puppies are not in the same place or at the same age
Jennifer would not give us her phone number or call us on ours
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