SCAM SPOT: How scammers are exploiting puppy love

Ben Young
08:00am July 18 2024

The search for a new puppy can be a highly emotional experience. 

Unfortunately, it’s one that scammers are exploiting to get people to financially and emotionally invest in a puppy that doesn’t exist. 

I’d like to take you on a journey into how these scams work.

A colleague was looking for a new puppy recently. Her heart was set on a particular rare breed and through her research she found a helpful Facebook page that marketed itself as a venue to bring dog buyers and sellers together. 

Her attention was drawn to one of the sellers on the site advertising their adorable pup.

But my colleague had heard of puppy scams and was understandably wary. She sent me the ad and asked the fraud department to check if it was legit.

We soon confirmed that it was not, based on a couple of specific points:

1. The address linked to the Facebook page tracked to an animal adoption centre. When we checked it out, we found the centre had no connection to the page. 

2. The photos. They certainly looked cute but many of them didn’t look like they were taken in Australia.

The fact that the Facebook page has hundreds of followers is of no significance. Scammers buy bundles of bot users to mass ‘like’ or ‘follow’ a page to add credibility. 

Dig a bit deeper and it becomes obvious that the page is essentially cloned around the world with dog adoption pages from Perth to Pennsylvania, all showing the same dogs available. 

So, we knew it was probably a scam – but we wanted to illustrate more about how it worked. 

The specific puppy my colleague had her eye on was called Chappo and seemed perfect. But it turned out that the seller, let’s call him Barry, said he lived in Grafton – a regional town over 600 kilometres north of Sydney.

Barry recommended we use a pet delivery service to save us the 1,200 km round trip to pick up Chappo. In fact, that’s how these scams work. Most people go with the delivery option and proceed to make payment for a non-existent dog. 

A pick-up address was also reluctantly offered, with little expectation that we would make the long journey.
 

Westpac's Head of Fraud Ben Young and some puppies. (Josh Wall)

But we decided to travel to Grafton.  It’s a beautiful town, and there are plenty of great dogs there too, but  of course, Chappo is not one of them. And Barry was not there either.

The address he had given took us to the home of an elderly resident who doesn’t even own a dog.

This is another way these sorts of scams create victims, by inferring others are involved that are not. 

Barry was unaware of our visit to Grafton, so we let him know we had decided to go with the delivery option.

He gave us his bank details. These do not belong to Barry but an intermediary set up by scammers to make following the money much harder.

These intermediary accounts are set up with a whole range of banks, enabling the scam to be replicated with different non-existent dogs in different parts of the country – but always a considerable distance from the scammer.

Out of interest, we managed to trace the real “Chappo” using photos we found in an Instagram post. He actually belongs to a loving home in the US and is not available for adoption or sale. 

“Chappo” (not his actual name) is living a great life and was not at all distressed by these events.

But this scam is not just about puppies. When people get desperate for something, from rare memorabilia to the latest hot ticket, they are more prepared to take risks to acquire it - and that is where the scammers lie in wait.

If you are buying from someone directly, do not send funds electronically unless you have received or held the item.

When you buy things online, the credibility of the seller and their products is always at risk. While Visa and Mastercard will never do the sort of investigation we did, they do guarantee their sellers and their products. So if you get dudded with a card purchase, you will be refunded. But if you make a direct digital transfer, you are fully exposed to these scams.

Cute photos, professional web pages, and mock delivery addresses are easy to produce these days. Remembering this can save you a whole world of trouble.

This article is for educational purposes only. 
 

Ben Young

Ben Young is Westpac’s Head of Fraud and Financial Crime Insights. Ben’s team researches and operates Westpac’s key fraud protection processes for the ~25 million transactions processed each day by the bank, particularly around credit cards, internet banking, branch and applications for credit. Ben has been intimately involved in Westpac’s fraud processes since 2007 and has worked in various data led risk processes since 1997.

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