Veterinarians and animal rescue workers

An emotional purchase with a stolen face

Pet fraud works because the buyer is excited and the sums feel small. Stolen photos of real vets and rescue staff make the operation look supervised and humane: a clinic photo attached to a health certificate, a rescue worker's face beside a "forever home" story.

The fee ladder

After the deposit comes the shipping company — itself fake, often using the same stolen clinic imagery. A crate deposit, then insurance, then a vaccination or climate-control charge. Each fee is refundable on delivery, which is the line that keeps buyers paying.

Clinics under siege

Real clinics receive calls from buyers asking about animals they have never treated, and rescue charities lose donations to accounts that imitate them. Several publish permanent warnings that their photographs are stolen.

If these photos are yours

You are the second victim of this scam. The money goes to strangers, but the face, the name and the reputation are yours — and the angry messages from defrauded people land in your inbox, not the scammer's.

• Save everything: profile URLs, screenshots with visible usernames, message threads, and the dates you found them.
• Report the fake profile on the platform itself under impersonation, not spam. Impersonation reports are actioned faster and you can usually attach a photo ID.
• File a report with your national fraud body (IC3 in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, or your local police cyber unit).
• Submit the scammer's contact details — the email, phone, wallet or profile handle, never your own — to our database so the next person who searches that identifier finds a warning instead of a fake romance.
• If someone contacts you believing they were talking to you, be kind and clear: send them to a search page so they can verify the details for themselves.

If you were talking to one of these profiles

Slow down before you send anything. Ask for a live video call on a platform the other person did not choose. Ask for a photo holding a handwritten note with today's date and an unusual word you pick. Run the phone number, email, username or wallet address through our database. A genuine person will pass all three in minutes; a stolen-photo persona will produce excuses — bad signal, hospital shift, offshore rig, army firewall, "you don't trust me".

Never send money, gift cards, crypto or copies of your own ID to someone you have not met in person, no matter how complete the story sounds.