Bulldog Puppy Scam Muzzled

2007_05_babybd.jpgA 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.

"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."

Goris allegedly took 10% of the proceeds and then passed the rest to an unnamed accomplice in Nigeria, where many scams seem to originate.

And should you do a Google image search of English bulldog puppies, prepare to be distracted by their cuteness for at least 10 minutes.

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Comments (6) [rss]

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Jen:
You said "Of course, the shipping costs were $300-400 a pop." Don't you mean "$300-400 a pup?" :-)

Boat: Best grammatical correction ever. If you wanna harass jen, do it this way, folks! So cute.

This reminds me of the time that some guy was offering free Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. My nephew had one called Bacon. And another friend had a pig named MC Hamlet.

That puppy looks a lot more like a shar pei to me.

But, if Gothamist says it's a bulldog, then I must be wrong.

She "cried for days?" Go to a shelter.

I noticed that when you go to google images, and search "bulldog puppy" It will come up with that exact picture. They could have copied and pasted the picture, and put it on there websight.

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