A puppy scam advertises an animal that does not exist, takes a deposit, and then charges repeatedly for crates, insurance, vaccinations and customs before the delivery that never happens. Unlike other non-delivery fraud it is designed to take money several times. The BBB estimates only 4.8% of victims report it.
Somebody sells you a dog that does not exist, and then keeps selling it to you.
That second clause is what separates this from ordinary purchase fraud. Most non-delivery scams take one payment and vanish. This one is built to take several. The deposit is only the opening: after it come a climate-controlled crate, pet insurance, vaccination certificates, a customs charge, a temperature surcharge, a re-delivery fee after a missed collection. Each is modest against what has already been paid, and each is presented as the final obstacle between you and an animal you have now named.
The measured harm looks small — the Better Business Bureau records a median loss of $600 to $750 across four years — but the measurement is the least reliable on this site. The BBB’s estimate is that only 4.8% of victims report at all.
No national agency breaks pet scams out as a category. They disappear into general non-delivery figures, which is why this page leans on a consumer organisation’s data and says so.
A purebred puppy for a few hundred dollars where the breed usually costs thousands. Photographs either stolen from a real breeder or, increasingly, AI-generated — which is why a reverse image search finding nothing is no longer reassurance.
Questions about your garden, your children, your working hours. The vetting inverts the relationship: they become the careful party, and you become the one being assessed.
A payment app, a bank transfer, gift cards. Never a card, never a platform checkout — because those can be reversed.
A separate “pet transport company” with its own website, tracking page and support agent. It is the same operation, and the handover exists to make the fees that follow look like third-party charges rather than more money to the seller.
A special crate. Insurance. Vaccination certificates. Customs. A temperature-controlled surcharge.
Where it could have stopped
The first payment was never meant to be the last. Every fee arrives framed as the final obstacle between you and an animal you have already named, and there is no number of payments that produces a dog. When a second fee appears after the deposit, stop — the money already sent is gone either way, and everything after it is avoidable.
The puppy is cold at a depot. It is distressed and will be returned to the breeder unless a fee is paid within the hour. This is the point at which people who had begun to doubt pay anyway.
The site stays up, or reappears within days under a new domain with the same photographs.
The purchase is emotional before any money moves. By the time a deposit is discussed the buyer has chosen a specific animal, shown the children a photograph, and possibly agreed a name. Withdrawing means disappointing a family, not just losing a transaction.
The seller performs care. Home checks, questions about your garden, insistence on the right owner. It is exactly what a responsible breeder does, and it makes scepticism feel like an insult.
Scarcity is genuine. Waiting lists for popular breeds are real, and prices are high enough that a bargain reads as luck rather than as a warning.
The fees are individually small and always the last one. Nobody decides to spend $2,000 on a non-existent dog. They decide to spend $150 four times, each time to rescue something already paid for.
Distress overrides doubt. “The puppy is cold and will be returned” is not an argument about money. It arrives after the buyer has been emotionally invested for a week, and it works on people who had already started to suspect.
And almost nobody reports. A few hundred dollars, no realistic investigation, and embarrassment about something you wanted badly. The 4.8% figure is the scheme’s real defence.
There is no prosecution record here comparable to the other schemes on this site, and that absence is itself the finding: individual losses are too small to attract federal attention, and the operators are outside the jurisdictions where the victims live.
The best available attribution is analytical rather than evidential. Analysis cited in the BBB’s study placed 31% of scammers in Cameroon and 30% in South Africa, with about 3% in India and India-based groups registering most of the domains. That is an estimate from complaint analysis, not an enforcement finding, and it should be read with that weight.
What it does indicate reliably is scale and organisation. Hundreds of near-identical breeder sites, matching “pet transport” companies with their own branding and tracking pages, and domains registered in bulk are not the work of individuals with one fake listing. It is a template business, and when a site is reported and removed the same photographs reappear on a new domain within days.
In June 2026 the FTC described several distinct pet-related scams running at once: fraudsters posing as veterinarians or law enforcement claiming to have your lost pet, counterfeit animal shelter websites soliciting donations, and prize scams targeting people who had previously donated to animal charities. Stolen or AI-generated images of animals appear across all of them.
The Better Business Bureau's 2025 puppy scam study update recorded 1,632 reports through September 2025 with a median loss of $600, following 2,278 reports in 2024 and 2,899 in 2023. Its most important figure is not a loss total: it estimates that only 4.8% of victims report the fraud to authorities at all. Analysis cited in the study placed 31% of scammers in Cameroon and 30% in South Africa.
Purchase scams are the highest-volume fraud in every national dataset that separates them, and they attract the least attention. UK Finance recorded purchase scams as 71% of all authorised push payment cases in 2025, with losses of £118.1 million. The FBI logged 56,478 non-payment and non-delivery complaints and $503.4 million. In Australia, more people reported losing money to shopping scams than to any other type.
Before you pay anything. See the animal with its mother — in person, or on a live video call you direct. Ask them to pick the puppy up, move to another room, hold up a piece of paper with today’s date. A recorded clip is not a live call, and a seller who cannot manage two minutes of video has answered the question.
Search a distinctive sentence from the listing in quotation marks; template text turns up on other sites. Look up the address. Pay by a method with protection, and prefer a breeder registered with a recognised body or a rescue organisation you found yourself.
If you have paid a deposit and a fee has now appeared. Stop. This is the single most useful moment on this page. The deposit is very likely gone; the fees are not yet. Every further payment is a choice you can still avoid, and no sequence of them produces an animal.
If you have paid.
If someone claims to have your lost pet. Do not pay over the phone. Ask which veterinary practice, then call that practice on a number you look up. A real vet takes card payment; the FTC’s rule applies exactly — if the only way to pay is a gift card, a payment app, cryptocurrency or a wire transfer, it is a scam.
Deposits and fees go to payment-app accounts and mule accounts, and move on within days. Because the sums are small and frequent, they sit far below any threshold that triggers a bank’s attention — a series of $150 payments to different recipients looks like ordinary life.
The infrastructure side is more interesting than the money side. A single operation runs many breeder sites and a matching set of fake transport companies, and the marginal cost of another site is close to zero. Taking one down removes a domain, not a business.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains where the deposits go — and why many small payments to many accounts are harder to detect than one large transfer.
No agency publishes a line item for most of the schemes on this site, so these charts show the official categories that contain this scheme. Each series is labelled with the agency's own category name. See how the mapping works.
Insist on seeing the animal with its mother, in person or on a live video call where you direct what is shown — ask them to pick the puppy up, move to a different room, show today's date on a piece of paper. A breeder who will not do that has answered the question. Reputable breeders also expect to be visited.
Not any more. The FTC records pet scams using AI-generated images, which appear nowhere else because they have never existed anywhere else. Absence from a reverse image search used to be reassuring and is now neutral.
Shipping fees are normal; a sequence of them is not. The scheme is built on escalation — crate, insurance, vaccinations, customs, a temperature-controlled surcharge — each framed as the last obstacle. If a second fee appears after the deposit, stop paying. There is no number of payments that produces a dog.
Rarely, because the payment method is the point. These scams insist on payment apps, transfers and gift cards precisely because those cannot be reversed. Call your bank the same day anyway, and report it — the reporting rate is so low that each report matters more than usual.
Treat it exactly as a family emergency scam. Do not pay over the phone. Ask for the practice name and call it back on a number you look up yourself. A real vet takes card payment and does not demand gift cards or cryptocurrency.
Because no national agency breaks pet scams out as a category — they sit inside general non-delivery or online shopping figures. The only structured data comes from the Better Business Bureau's Scam Tracker, which is self-reported. We use it and say so.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.