Scammers prey on Richmonders with missing pets
A new scam is targeting local pet owners who've lost their pet and posted online about it, the Richmond SPCA tells Axios.
Why it matters: This might be the cruelest scam in history.
How it works: Fraudsters are finding online missing pet posts and calling the owners to tell them their pet has been found, but is injured, Richmond SPCA spokesperson Tabitha Treloar tells Axios.
They're using spoofed phone numbers so the call looks like it's coming from the Richmond SPCA.
The scammer, impersonating someone from the shelter, says the injured fur baby needs urgent surgery.
And the shelter, the fraudster says, needs immediate payment via Venmo, Zelle or another payment platform to cover the cost, which is usually thousands of dollars.
What they're saying: "It's really devastating for pet guardians to be targeted this way — people are understandably vulnerable when a pet is missing," Treloar says.
Threat level: It's not just the Richmond SPCA, which has gotten at least four calls from locals targeted by the lost pet scam in recent weeks.
The Richmond Animal League had reports of two identical incidents last month, RAL spokesperson Allana Maiden tells Axios.
Richmond Animal Care & Control posted about three incidents in which its number was spoofed for a similar scam in February.
And it's happening nationwide, according to a post from Professional Pet Tracker, a Virginia-based pet finding service.
Zoom in: In one of the incidents at RAL last month, a couple was told they needed to pay $2,000 to cover surgery for their injured and missing cat, Maiden says.
They negotiated to pay just over $1,000 up front and the rest when they picked up their cat.
When they showed up at the Chesterfield shelter to bring their kitty home, RAL had to break the news: they'd been scammed. And their cat was still missing.
RAL never heard back from them to find out if their bank was able to reverse the charges, or if they found their cat.
The bottom line: No shelter would ask for money to treat a pet over the phone, per their posts.
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