Bulldog Puppy Scam Muzzled
A Lower East Side woman was charged by the Queens DA's office for not delivering English bulldog puppies after customers paid for them. The Queens DA's office believes that Janet Goris never actually had any puppies when she advertised on various websites that she was looking for to find puppies a "loving home" and requested that interested parties only pay the shipping costs. Of course, the shipping costs were $300-400 a pop.
The Sun has details on how the authorities caught wind of the scheme:
A victim of the alleged scam, Jenny Chavis, 30, from Sebring, Fla., said the advertisement she found on Yahoo Classified claimed the puppies belonged to a traveling evangelical minister, the Reverend James Collins, whose mission helped find homes for the baby bulldogs.Goris allegedly took 10% of the proceeds and then passed the rest to an unnamed accomplice in Nigeria, where many scams seem to originate."I have four children who were so excited to pick the dogs up from the airport," Ms. Chavis said. "I cried for days."
Ms. Chavis said she was instructed to wire $400 to a Western Union branch in the East Elmhurst section of Queens. After the funds were processed, a man who said he was Rev. Collins contacted her, she said.
"He asked for another $200 to get the dogs released from Customs," Ms. Chavis said. "That's when I knew it was a scam."
And should you do a Google image search of English bulldog puppies, prepare to be distracted by their cuteness for at least 10 minutes.
