Staying Fit
RJ, 58, a landscape designer in New Jersey, was devastated after her beloved dog, a boxer named Ballantine, died in 2021. Two years passed before she was ready to welcome another boxer to her family. Finally, last March, RJ (whose initials have been used for privacy) reached out to a breeder — Mary, we’ll call her — of boxers in Madrid whom she’d been following for a few years on Instagram.
Mary said that she had a litter on the way and that RJ could secure a pup if she sent a deposit of 540 euros (about $575) through PayPal — insisting she use the “Sending money to friends and family” option rather than “Paying for an item or service” to expedite the transaction, which she did.
Then, after the puppies were born, Mary asked RJ to pay the equivalent of about $2,100 more, plus $1,875 to have the puppy shipped from Madrid to Newark, New Jersey, with a human escort. RJ paid, but Mary said that the trip needed to be rescheduled, then that the handler had missed a connecting flight.
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RJ was now extremely concerned (“I wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t eat and was up all night long on calls abroad to Spain to engage attorneys and law enforcement there,” she says), so she asked for proof that any flights had been booked; finally, RJ says, “I realized I was dealing with scammers,” and told them so.
In response, the breeder and the shipper began demanding that RJ pay them more money because, they claimed, the flights had gone up in price and Mary was “insulted” that RJ had called her a scammer. (AARP has reached out to Mary for a response to the allegations through her website.)
It’s all too easy for criminals to advertise adorable puppies for sale online, make a deal with an eager animal lover, then disappear once they have a payment in hand. Pet scams took off during the pandemic, “but really have continued,” says Mark Fetterhoff, who helps manage AARP’s Fraud Watch Network.