Victim Location 55318
Type of a scam Online Purchase
The Yorkie scammers are back at it again. If you submit an inquiry via the Contact Us section of the website http://fantasticyorkiehome.com/, they will start texting you asking which puppy you want and then request payment via Amazon gift cards. They ask that you purchase a couple of $200 gift cards and send them a picture message of the back side of the cards with the scratch off code revealed. They will also ask for a copy of the receipt on which you purchased the cards. As per previous scams, they will then send you bogus flight information and keep you going making it seem like things are moving forward. Note that this is simply done to buy themselves time to ensure that the gift cards cannot be recovered. Once you’ve sent the gift cards to them, you have about 24 hours to reverse things before the loss is permanent. When the scammers take the gift cards and make immediate purchases on Amazon, note that the gift cards are simply "pre-authorized" at that point even though the balance will already show $0. This just ensures that the gift cards isn’t overdrawn – just like a credit authorization temporarily deducts from the remaining balance of you credit line. If you contact Amazon and explain what happened, they can put the gift cards on hold which means when the product(s) the scammers ordered with the cards are ready for shipment from Amazon, the actual debit to the gift card will be declined and the shipment will not go out. In this way, since Amazon didn’t ship anything, the balance of the cards will return to their previous amount once the pre-authorization expires. I was able to do that for a friend of mine that was scammed in this way.
Anyway, regardless of the status of their fraudulent Amazon order(s), the next day the scammers send you an email saying that the puppy is held up in an airport due to a needed veterinary evaluation before it can proceed to your state. At that point they ask you for even MORE money than you originally paid for the puppy. One of the emails the friend of mine received was from [email protected] That’s as far as the situation has gone so far.
In researching this, it was obvious that most if not all of the elements on the scammer’s website were simply copied and pasted from legitimate Yorkie websites. This was easy to confirm by simply copying a snippet of some of the text displayed on their website and pasting it into a google search. Google results will show you the other sites on which the identical text exists – one of which will be a legitimate site, the rest bogus.
Thank you.